I don't know what the overall scheme was for the clusterfubar known as CIVIL WAR: THE INITIATIVE, aside from finding another means of monetizing the CIVIL WAR. But for writer Dwayne McDuffie, the seven issues of FANTASTIC FOUR's part in this farrago seem to have been his excuse to recycle familiar FF-tropes with some minor new touches.
Though these issues are given the umbrella title RECONSTRUCTION, they're three separate stories loosely associated by (a) Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman take a "second honeymoon" break from the team, and (b) Black Panther and his relatively new wife Storm substitute for them.
RECONSTRUCTION is a pleasingly slick routine, with McDuffie supplying many wry one-liners and Paul Pelletier providing glamorous art. But the first is a "cosmic" story in which the New FF tries to save a living planet, name of "Epoch," from Galactus, which is little more than a redo of an old THOR idea with the Silver Surfer guest starring. The third story is an even more rushed idea involving the entity Eternity, who's "dying" from what might be called cosmic antibodies. Both stories are wrapped up with deus ex machina solutions. Oh, and Doc Strange guests.
The middle story shows McDuffie more in his normal vein, as the Frightful Four sets a series of traps for the New FF. Actually, this time the Frightful group is a quintet, including usual suspects Wizard, Trapster, Titania, Hydro-Man, and relative newcomer Klaw. Efficient if unremarkable superhero fare, with the odd decision to make the Wizard into Doctor Doom in one sense: that he hates Reed Richards for being the superior intellect.
The middle story's also a source of interest in that it seems to foreground a trend that took off in the 2010s: Marvel's attempt to play down the X-Men, because the film rights to the merry mutants were owned by 20th-Century Fox. In one possibly coincidental line, the Wizard mocks Storm and the Panther as "C-listers." Maybe that was just meant to be standard villain-snark, but it's hard to believe that any character in the Marvel Universe would have regarded any X-MEN member as a C-lister. The Panther, yes, if a villain deemed him just a costumed athlete. But Storm and the other X's were highly visible "in-Universe," if not nearly as popular with average citizens as the Fantastic Four.
True, the Marvel Cinematic Universe only launched with IRON MAN in 2008, the final year of this short McDuffie arc. It probably took a few years for Marvel (or Disney) to decide that when the comics hyped the still-popular X-MEN, they were actually publicizing properties that made money for Fox, not for Disney. But if the Wizard's putdown of an X-Woman was just coincidence, rather than a harbinger of things to come in the 2010s, it's still the most interesting thing about this arc.
No comments:
Post a Comment