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MARVEL MANGAVERSE: FANTASTIC FOUR #1
"Mega-Scale Metatalent Response Team Fantastic Four"
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Adam Warren
Pencils: Keron Grant
Inks: Rob Stull
Colors: Chris Walker
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Brian Smith
Price: $2.25 US/$3.50 CAN |
In this issue, a nifty concept for the Mangaverse Fantastic Four is sabotaged by some very unclear artwork and a repetitive story pattern. Warren's sense of humor and appreciation for the manga style is in evidence in the writing, but he fails to really convey who the characters are or get across their origin story very well. Part of the blame for this can probably be laid at the feet of Keron Grant, whose work here is miles above his Iron Man work but
still not terribly clear, and he suffers under the very dark and overwhelming
colors of Chris Walker. A case of good ideas, poor execution, I'm afraid.
Warren uses several
flashbacks in this story, and the choice of that structure is completely
unnecessary, largely because the flashbacks are so short they don't convey any
information. One or two pages, or even one or two panels, are not enough to tell
us what the origin of this Fantastic Four was, and he would have been better off
not including any references to their origin, because then at least I wouldn't
have spent any time trying to puzzle it out.
Honestly, I would have been
much happier if he hadn't tried to explain where the powers come from. The
strongest aspect of this issue is that the very different take on the members of
the Fantastic Four. Reed Richards as a somewhat sleazy and arrogant jerk was a
very different approach, and I loved the more impulsive version of the Human
Torch we got with Jonatha Storm. Also, while I felt the strange spellings or
pronunciations were unnecessary (Sioux? Ben-Ya-Meen?), I liked those characters
as well. The change in personality from Ben as he takes on his armored form was
a particularly hilarious bit of characterization.
The scale of the action was
pretty nifty as well. I liked that the characters encompassed their usual powers
as well as the more "manga-esque" notion of giant armored suits, and while I
felt Grant and Walker really fell down on the job of storytelling, they did a
good job of conveying the scale of the action, at least.
However, the story itself gets very repetitive. Single character is introduced, fights Annihilus, loses. Next character does the exact same thing. Team wins through the use of an ending that even the characters complain is deus ex machina. It's repetitive, and having read his work on Gen 13, I know that Adam Warren is capable of much
better.
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