Fantastic Four #11 – Review

By: Matt Fraction and Christopher Sebela (writers), Mark Bagley (penciler), Joe Rubinstein (inker), Paul Mounts (colorist)

The Story: With time running out for Reed, Sue, and Ben, the Fantastic Four find themselves caught between the future and the past – more literally than you’d think.

The Review: The Fantastic Four are known as the first family of comics, but those who haven’t visited the Baxter Building lately might not know how apt the moniker is. Reed has just come clean to the rest of the team about his, and by extension their, condition and Valeria is having a hard time accepting it. Mind you that being Reed Richard’s daughter doesn’t do much to teach you your limits, but, though the issue focuses on seemingly reasonable attempts to reverse the disorder, Fraction and Sebela write Valeria’s uncertainty brilliantly. Small strokes paint a picture, revealing the stakes if she should fail and the pain of a child who doesn’t quite know that their parents will be there tomorrow.

Other characters get comparatively less attention. Some, like Ben, need to be a little more substantive, but Fraction is clearly able to do a lot with a little and things like Johnny’s relationships come through strongly, even when he’s not in the scene.

Fittingly for the Fantastic Four, there’s plenty of big ideas and science. At times the, admittedly considered, time travel jargon can be a bit dense, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for getting lost in Valeria’s plans. Time travel is often a hard genre to follow and, though the writers have some interesting ways of bringing new things to the table, the cost of such innovation is a lack of clarity in some places.

This ambiguity also extends to the storytelling in a few key places. Franklin’s struggles in particular come kind of out of nowhere and disappear without much explanation beyond ‘he’s Franklin Richards’. The time bomb also threw me, sending me scurrying back to previous pages to check if I missed something.