Marvel 1995 Week--Fantastic Four #402!!

Oh, man, just look at this cover:

There's 1995 in a nutshell. A special logo just for the FF "family" of mags, a mini-event with its own logo, craptacular all-metal & flesh costumes...I guess the good news is that the FF had just stopped wearing those ridiculous leather jackets that the Avengers were still stuck with.

But, despite the outward trappings, the Fantastic Four was not completely lost to the excesses of the 1990s at this point. They were, however, completely DeFalco-tized.

Now, in full disclosure, I was never a fan of Tom DeFalco's time on the FF, so I'm prepared to concede that maybe I've been too harsh on him as a writer.

Let's acknowledge, first of all, the man's bad luck, having to follow the Walt Simonson runs on both Thor and the Fantastic Four. Talk about a thankless task, and a way to get your work judged far too harshly! And certainly, anyone who can put together a 6-year run on a title, as he and artist/co-plotter Paul Ryan did on FF, deserves some level of praise, as does his 6-year run on Thor, mostly with artist/co-plotter Ron Frenz.

And, for the record, I'm much higher on his Thor work, as I thought that DeFalco and Frenz did an enjoyably retro Lee/Kirby pastiche, a return to the character's Silver Age look and feel. Never great, certainly nothing like Simonson's run, but never bad...comfort food.

Ah, but the Fantastic Four...let me be fair: DeFalco had a LOT of ideas for the FF, and always kept things in motion. Unfortunately for me, they were quite frequently ideas that I never cared for. Plus, while it worked in Thor, I found his dialogue in the FF to be frequently purple and over-the-top.

But the man never let anything stagnate. Retconning Alicia Storm into Lyja, always at least one character hanging around who "wasn't what they seemed," bringing back Malice, having Ben wear a helmet and drop even deeper into self-pity mode, a mix of (mostly lame) original villains and old standbys, bringing Kristoff back to life, rotating members in and out, a seemingly constant high-octane soap opera of pouty on-again, off-again relationships...say what you will, DeFalco never let things sit still, even if you weren't pleased with everything he did.

Towards the end, though, I do feel he strained far too hard to keep things moving. Alternate futures, poorly explained cosmic wars, characters rapidly aged to adulthood, descendants of characters from alternate futures, relatives of those descendants, very convoluted plots...at times it all began to have way too much of an X-Men feel for my taste.

But hey, I'm not going to say it was all bad, or that DeFalco & Ryan were bad writers. I just didn't care for their stuff.

Which brings us to:

See what I mean about about constant churning? Yes, right now the FF consists of Sue, Ben, Scott Lang Ant-Man, and Kristoff Von Doom. And Doom's retainer, Boris, hanging around (even though he was actually Zarko, the Tomorrow Man!!). Reed and Victor Von Doom were dead, Johnny was off in other parts of the Atlantis Rising story...so we get this oddball team. Standard operating during the DeFalco days!

Oh, yes, and Ben's face was supposed to look like that--Wolverine had mauled him awhile back, and the Thing wore a helmet for awhile to cover what was surely the slowest-healing injury in Marvel history (oh, OK, that was Tony Stark's heart...).

Oh, and Atlantis Rising?? Well, Morgan LeFey wants to use Atlantis as the basis to establish a magical empire--so she raises it from the ocean floor!! There's more that we'll cover as we go. For now just note that the pounding on the ship's hull...??

That's Thor, in a very stupid costume, whom she has in her thrall. Uh-oh.

So Ben barrel rolls him off:

And Sue has Kristoff fire a missile:



Well played!! Unfortunately, that pisses off LeFey:

Oh, and by the way, did I mention:


The Inhumans' city of Attilan had been shrunken down and put it in a glass jar (no, it wasn't Brainiac!), and stolen from the moon. And Morgan had it now, and had decided that a city full of powerful Inhumans to enthrall was an even better idea that an empty city full of dead Atlanteans. So she's going to enlarge it on top of Atlantis!!

Meanwhile, what about the Atlanteans??

That's something I really dislike (and not just about DeFalco)--making mass murder a plot point, and then carelessly tossing it away. 60% of the Atlanteans died?!?! 6 out of every 10?? That's amazing...that should call for international tribunals and lots of corncern about the dying of a people and culture and a meeting of the Illuminati and...But no, like the destruction of Alderan, it's just a plot point here to show what bastards the villains are, never to be mentioned again. (Seriously, her whole planet is destroyed, including her father, and Leia spends 1 second mourning, and it's never mentioned ever again?? What was up with that?!? But I digress...)

Still, the genocide is enough to provide mulletedNamor a reason to be a jerk--not that he has ever needed one before:

But Vashti call him on it...

Well, the FF have arrived in London to brief NATO (what, not S.H.I.E.L.D??) on the crisis, when look who turns up?


Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that it somehow turns out that Atlantis is the Inhumans' "hereditary homeland," and now that it's above water, they want to claim it for themselves!!

Well, you can guess how Namor takes that, can't you?

So we get the spectacle of Namor versus Black Bolt, in an apparently very respectful battle:


Seriously, Namor? You're one punch into the battle, and you can tell from that one punch Black Bolt's "courage" and "nobility?" Really, a battle-base Rorschach test??

Meanwhile, the ersatz FF is battling the rest of the Inhumans, although no one seems particularly clear why...which leads to this amusing scene:

Ant-Man...no respect, no respect at all.

Namor and Bolt are building up to one, final mega-punch each:


D'oh!!! Good one, Sue!!

The Inhumans bail, thanks to their teleporting dog...

...but that's OK, because guess who shows up, good and pissed??

D'oh...to be concluded in Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising #2. Trust me, the good guys win at the end.

Fallout from the mini-event? Johnny Storm leaves the FF to join Fantastic Force (please don't ask); because Sue doesn't truly trust Kristoff, so she asks Lyja to join the FF for awhile, so they become an unofficial Fantastic Five; bereft of subjects, Namor hangs around awhile; they find Reed and Doom, and meet Reed & Sue's hypothetical grandson...and it all means nothing, because Heroes Reborn is coming hard and fast, and after the FF got back, 99% of this all seemed to be forgotten (although DeFalco did resurrect a bunch of it in his MC2 Universe titles...)

But, all in all, not a terrible issue, and the FF did do a better job than most of weathering the mid-90s. While I'm still not going to be Tom DeFalco's biggest fan, I'm not going to be a hater, either. He wasn't as good as some, but it wasn't through a lack of effort, or lack of imagination, or unwillingness to try new things--those are franchise killers. He kept the pot a-boilin', and sometimes that's enough.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Look, someone was reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman:

Plot description from GCD: "Sister Nil tells the tale of how Nightmare wanted a successor, and he choose either Doctor Strange or Sister Nil."

Let's see, chalky white gothy demi-gods fighting for control over the dream realm...with cover art by a gent who had drawn Sandman and the Endless before...I wonder which demo Marvel was trying to push Doctor Strange to...?