Fantastic Four: Dark Reign #5

A few months ago I raved about the first issue of Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four: Dark Reign miniseries. I've kept quiet about the issues since, because I kept waiting for Hickman to pull a plot out of his hat and make good on that early promise. Instead, we got three issues of alternate reality silliness that went nowhere (doesn't Sue make a sexy gunslinger? Doesn't Sue make a bad-@$$ World War 2 commando? Oh look, it's the ever-so-merry Elizabethan FF*!), and now the series has wrapped with little more than a tease for Hickman's upcoming run on the regular Fantastic Four title.

Reed returns from his interdimensional jaunt. He lies to his wife about dismantling the machine that just endangered his family's lives. (How does the "smartest man" in the Marvel universe keep forgetting what a bonehead move that always is?) Norman Osborn backs off from the Baxter Building after the Richards' son Franklin shoots Norman in the shoulder with a pop-gun. How's that work? Never explained. And we get a glimpse of shadowy beings waiting between dimensions, promising to help Reed in his ambiguous quest to "solve everything." Which is also apparently the title of Hickman's first regular FF story.

Oh, and Reed has become convinced that the only thing that could have saved the world from the consequences of the Marvel's Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc. would have been if he had faced these problems alone. If he's wrong, it's hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy. Yet so far we've seen nothing to contradict Reed's supposition, and I'm more afraid that Hickman really does intend for Reed to be that unique. It's an utterly implausible conceit: in a multiverse of infinite** possibilities, we're to believe Reed Richards is the only man capable of saving the Earth from Skrulls and itself? Did Reed's Reality Bridge transport this series into the DC Universe by mistake?

Perhaps the story of the Bridge was doomed*** from the start. Perhaps the reason no one has explored alternate-reality problem solving in 40+ years of Fantastic comics is because there's no satisfying place for that story to go. Even if Reed discovers some great solution to the world's dilemmas, can we truly appreciate a resolution the hero never personally had to fight for? Or maybe this story has barely begun, and Hickman will wow us yet. But that still won't excuse these 4 out of 5 issues of FF: Dark Reign in which nothing really happened.

Marvel, please. If you've got a story that's at least passably self-contained, go ahead and make it a mini-series. If an arc is just the beginning of a longer epic, I'm cool with that too, just put it in the main title from the start. Is that so much to ask?

- JC

* No relation to 1602's Four from the Fantastick
**That word still means what I think it means, right?
**Not a pun, the Doc's not even in this story - unless his latest fiendish plot is just that cunning?