The Last Fantastic Four Story
Writer: Stan Lee
Artist: John Romita JR & Scott Hanna
This last Fantastic Four story, certainly isn't the best. 'Nuff said.
Did I have you there for a second there? No? Maybe? Anyway. The story deals with the Cosmic Tribunal deciding that Earth is not worth having in the universe, so they dispatch an agent to tell the Earth that they have a week before it is destroyed. The FF must stop them, and while Reed calls the Silver Surfer and eventually, Galactus, the rest of the Marvel Universe tries their hand at stopping this agent. This isn't the last Fantastic Four story because they fail or die, but it's the last because they decide to retire, based on the fact that they can never top themselves, and people will never fully remember all that they have done for them and that they can't make enough money off T-shirts and toys. Yeah. Not the best FF ever.
And it's hard to call this an FF story because they don't do much in this book. Sure the Thing clobbers and Johnny fire-blasts in pages and pages of the book, but Reed and Sue just stand around gawking. The Avengers, Namor, the Inhumans, and Doctor Doom, do more to stop the threat than the FF do. Reed doesn't even come up with some amazing scientific way of stopping this threat, he just uses his connections. That's not much a send off to Reed. This week's regular FF book has better Reed moments than this book.
John Romita Jr. does a great job on the art, when doesn't he? And draws pretty much everyone in the Marvel U. Morry Hollowell colors the book, and I still have the same complaint that I do when he colored JRJR in the Fallen Son: Captain America issue. He colors everything the same as when he's working with McNiven. Yes, Hollowell is a great colorist, one of the best, but he needs to adjust his style when not working with a hyper-detailed or realistic artist like Steve McNiven. JRJR doesn't need all the detail in his colors that McNiven does. JRJR needs a flatter palatte. I don't need to see the soft fleshy undertones of JRJR's Reed Richards. That's probably the biggest thing that bugged me about the art, is that if you laid this book next to Civil War and looked at them from about 5 feet away, you wouldn't be able to tell which book was which until you looked at the linework. This issue really isn't worth buying, but when are you going to be able to say that you bought a Stan Lee FF story off the shelf? Other than that, there's no need to get this issue. Go get Fantastic Four #543 (the 45th anniversary issue) and read the Stan Lee story in there where the FF try to avoid the annoying Stan Lee, that was leagues better than this. D
