Ultimate Fantastic Four #21

The difference between most old people I know and most young people I know is that respectable old people tend not to want to be superheroes anymore. Ultimate Fantastic Four: a young Fantastic Four. Bravo on giving Reed Richards more realistic career aspirations. The irony of Mr. Fantastic idolizing Spider-Man given their mainstream cardinality is not lost. This is the book, “Fantastic Four,” greatest comic magazine in the world, darling of the 1960s college generation. That 21^st century pop culture knows them by that second rate summer jaunt just gone by while Spider-Man and the X-Men are institutions is embarrassing. The Marvel Ultimate line reflects the way these chips fell. Ultimate Fantastic Four was the last of the line to launch, and sells the worst. The team origin story was padded and decompressed across two years.

But this opening Millar issue was good. Really good. Gone are the long, eighty-per-cent-of-the-panel Bendis gabs; likewise Ellis's pussyfooting and self-conscious, quasi-scientific bullshit. This stuff moves. Reed Richards and Sue Storm just so happened to have been designing a time machine; and that's exactly what comic book scientists are supposed to be able to do in their spare time. The throw-away, high-concept caper, the adoring public, the Fantasticar – mark by mark by mark. The issue doesn't ape a single piece of old material. It just channels the signature thrills.

And then there was the slam-bang surprise – this was very much the product of an intelligent mind. After the aforementioned meandering, the Ultimate Fantastic Four are, with perhaps a single exception, shallow characters. Their principal appeal is their tie to that other Fantastic Four and the forty-year wealth of characterization associated therewith. Millar recognizes and capitalizes on this, creating a situation in which the young Reed Richards longs to be his true self. As a youth-oriented line, no sentiment could be more consistent with the Ultimate mandate. Compliments to Messrs. Millar, Land, and Ryan. This is the good stuff.

Supreme literature communicates; savage and charismatic, it loves you and bends you to its love. And then there was the american comic book, home of the superhero. Everyone loves the superhero. He finally drives multi-million, mass-consumption, summer blockbusters. We remember him from Saturday's cartoons and childhood's halloweens. But there's not much to him. Comic book superhero is a simple pleasure, a plebian metaphor for the complexities of life, a throwback to a less sophsiticated time, our, respective, lesser sophistications, loved and retained for sentimental value. Real literature is hard. The superhero is easy. Real issues sting, and superhero shall always triumph over real issues once inked and tri-colored and inserted into that childhood world. This in lieu of our own triumphs.
But when we were young, we wanted to be superhero. Granted, we wanted to be firefighter and veterinarian and president and astronaut and circus performer too, but superhero was no less a legitimate possibilitiy of our future world. And those were to be our triumphs. Not metaphorically. Not for pretend. For real. At some early enough point, it was going to be real.