Fantastic Four #1: The Last Town on the Left

[superboyprime]

'It honestly came as an approach in response to what Dan Slott had been doing. After he pulled off "The Reckoning War" after years and years of buildup and full multiversal implications, there was no way to go bigger. So instead, I went in the opposite direction: smaller, more personal stories about these four heroes who are just trying to get by and, hopefully, leaving the world a little better than they found it.' - Ryan North

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Now I'm imagining a corrupt land developer intent on gentrifying a neighborhood inviting a superhero team to come and live somewhere in the hopes that they'll just... blow the area up and then it can be rebuilt to their likings.

[shadowseeking]

...so...those kids Ben and Alicia adopted didn't last long, did they?

[lordultimus]

I think they said they were with family?

[shadowseeking]

I mean that still kind of counts. They got written out to stay with unnamed mysterious family...put on a bus to comicbook limbo.

[remial]

better than one character on Days of Our Lives, who said, "I gotta go to the bathroom" and went up stairs.

and some 40 years later has never come back down. I think he is still up there.

[super_fly]

TBF I've had bathroom breaks like that.

[thehood]

They're still around. Ben and Alicia didn't disown them, they are still their kids.

[shadowseeking]

The fact that they were immediately written out into some random off panel "staying with family" when a new writer took over doesn't bode well for them

[thehood]

Ben is having some alone time with his wife and they talk about the kids several times in this issue, even mentioning how a boy reminds him of his son Jo. They wouldn't do that if they were just writing out the kids.

[laughing_tree]

Yeah, it seems downright weird to me to assume they’re written out just because they don’t appear here when Reed, Sue, Johnny, Val, and Franklin -also- all don’t appear this issue. Are they being written out too?

[onsokumaru]

The art is pretty good and Alicia is the cutest ever, but is it normal that she keeps making eye contact with people?

[tcampbell1000]

I'm not seeing that when I look close. Her head's generally pointed in the right direction, but her eyes seem to wander. Still, the partly whited-out effect makes them hard to see in some frames, so my brain does sometimes want to "autocomplete" her to make more eye contact than she actually does.

[bradygirl_12]

Ben as a ghost...hee hee hee!

[zylly]

Hopefully, we can just casually abandon the plot from Slott’s run of Alicia misusing the Puppet Master’s stuff.

[tcampbell1000]

Slott himself resolved that one: Alicia (with the Puppet Master advising her) realized that that was a road she didn't want to keep going down. And since no one else knows about it, it's unlikely to crop back up.

[zylly]

Okay, just spotty memory on my part then. I remembered her using them on Lyja late into the run and then I forget other details.

Either way, well worth putting into the "let us never speak of this again" box.

[jlbarnett]

I HATE it when writers do mystery stuff like that coming into a new run

[shadowseeking]

Same.

Not only is the 'mystery' rarely worth it, we have no idea how long the new run will last and if we'll ever get a payoff to the whole deal before some new writer takes over or an event derails the book or some other nonsense.

[tcampbell1000]

This is my favorite Marvel story of the year, and that includes all media.

I'm not really factoring in the cliffhanger too much, pro or con. It's a little weird that every Marvel hero is now getting a mystery AITA whenever they kick off a new series run, but...it's fine. It's completely believable that Reed Richards could've oopsie-Microversed a big chunk of Manhattan real estate, and of course Ben and Alicia would be mad if their kids were inside it at the time. I do like that Alicia concedes her own complicated feelings about it: she can't always be the voice of Ben's better angels. Basically, unless a cliffhanger is absolutely brilliant or awful, you have to take it on faith that the writer will resolve it well. Ryan had a lot of my faith already, and this issue bought a lot more.

[cainofdreaming]

This is my favorite Marvel story of the year, and that includes all media.

Have you tried Marvel's Midnight Suns yet? I mean, yeah, different tastes but I've been really liking it so far.

[blues32]

It just occurred to me...Alicia doesn't look a thing like Sue. In her first appearance, the Puppet Master noticed that she bore a remarkable resemblance to Susan Storm and decided to "play a prank" (help Ben enter the Baxter Building and murder Reed and Johnny), putting a wig on Alicia and she fooled Reed and Johnny until they noticed she was staring straight ahead and asking what was happening with the most confused expression on her face.

[cainofdreaming]

"Oh no! Sue's gone blind!"

"What? I'm not Sue."

"And hysterical!"

[blues32]

"Please, stop! It's just a wig!"

"And her hair has fallen off!"

[zylly]

The “looks like Sue” thing just raises all kinds of questions about Johnny (who once married “Alicia”) that we just don’t have time to unpack.