FF #6 – Review

by Jonathan Hickman (writer), Greg Tocchini (art), Paul Mounts (colors), and Clayton Cowles (letters)

The Story: The birth of Black Bolt is revealed.

What’s Good:  There are some really bold literary themes in this one and some of its certainly really, really cool.  As we delve into the birth of Black Bolt, Hickman makes allusions to Jesus Christ, comparing the births between the two.  One simply can’t help but make the messianic connections when a Zordon-looking supreme intelligence called Supremo orders mass murder to eliminate a soon-to-be-awakened threat in Black Bolt.  Pile that up with all the epic talk of destiny and such, and it’s quite striking.

As Supremo compiles data, he also confers with a religious figure about the prophesied troublemaker, and it’s a nice intersection of faith/religion and science.  The result is a discussion that leads to an end that feels like a hybrid of the two that could only really occur in a science fiction comic book.  Certainly, between this and the religious allegory, Hickman delivers a rather high-brow, literary feel to the issue.

What’s Not So Good:  That said, this comic almost completely alienated me.  It is in every way a Marvels cosmic issue and does not feel at all like a Future Foundation or Fantastic Four-related book.  Certainly, no member of the Future Foundation is even referred to, but the real problem is that the events of this issue are so far distanced to those of the story that we’ve been reading so far, that it ends up being almost incomprehensible.