Fantastic Four #601 – Review

by Jonathan Hickman (writing), Steve Epting (pencils), Rick Magyar & Mark Pennington (inks), Paul Mounts (colors), and Clayton Cowles (letters)

The Story: Johnny brings the cavalry.

The Review:  This past summer, Marvel and DC both put out company-wide events that were pretty underwhelming.  Truth be told, however, I haven’t really, really enjoyed an event from Marvel or DC since Civil War.  Blackest Night was all right, while everything else since has ranged from “sucked” to “disappointing.”

This arc of Hickman’s Fantastic Four, and issues like this one, show that Hickman succeeds where these events have failed.  In this issue, for instance, he manages to tell a story with universe wide implications and a fairly large cast, but at all times, there is an emotional core to the story that makes it all meaningful and gives the story heart.  Hickman balances the large-scale events with personal emotions in his characters, and the result is what I’ve been waiting for: an event that actually has a soul.

Of course, that’s the irony, isn’t it?  This isn’t an event at all, it’s just a story-arc set within Fantastic Four and FF.  That alone shows how impressive this issue is.  Despite being highly centralized, it feels massive in scale and effect.  The battles are immense, the stakes are enormous, and there is a substantial number of moving parts in the story.  The result is something that feels downright epic and, moreover, it all feels like it has been built up accordingly.  A lot of events are promoted as having been built up to for years, but in the case of Hickman’s Fantastic Four, that’s actually true, and one can feel the narrative weight of that.