Grant Morrison & Jae Lee Fantastic Four: 1234 (2002)
This is pretty much Morrison doing a Dark Knight on the Fantastic Four, safistacated storytelling, inner demons, lots of rain and lightning, familiar superheroes as mysterious, mythic, even Godlike, and I guess it does it very well in so much as that I didn't not enjoy it. Yet at the same time, it reminds me of all those other things Morrison wrote that I can't be bothered to think about, Batman and Green Lantern and the rest - elegant, efficient, beautifully crafted, but…
I'm presently buying back a whole shitload of American comics I bought in the eighties then got rid of in the nineties, five or six a week from an online shop seeing as they're inexplicably still pretty cheap for the most part, and generally seem to have stood the test of time - keeping in mind that they weren't pretending to be anything other than kid's comics. One of those I've not yet read is an old Fantastic Four annual which I picked up mainly because it ties in with the Days of Future Present story which ran though a couple of the X-Men books. I had a quick look at the thing when it came in the mail: the Fantastic Four are back from some previous adventure to discover the Baxter Building mysteriously transformed, and this isn't even a Fantastic Four with which I am familiar because the line-up includes the She-Hulk, a female version of the Thing, and Ben Grimm back in human form. I'm sure it will prove to be be ludicrous, brightly coloured, and with far too many thought bubbles and villains announcing what they plan to do, but even now I'm more intrigued to find out what goes on in that story and why the Thing has tits than I was by anything in 1234. Back when I was a full-time Marvel zombie, I recall Grant Morrison getting misty-eyed over the weirdness of comics in the sixties, notably that one where the Flash spends an entire issue of his own book as a paving slab; and in comic book terms, 1234 leaves me longing for the weirdness, not to mention all the stupid, colourful fun, of the late eighties.
It's not a bad book, but - well, you know…
This is pretty much Morrison doing a Dark Knight on the Fantastic Four, safistacated storytelling, inner demons, lots of rain and lightning, familiar superheroes as mysterious, mythic, even Godlike, and I guess it does it very well in so much as that I didn't not enjoy it. Yet at the same time, it reminds me of all those other things Morrison wrote that I can't be bothered to think about, Batman and Green Lantern and the rest - elegant, efficient, beautifully crafted, but…
I'm presently buying back a whole shitload of American comics I bought in the eighties then got rid of in the nineties, five or six a week from an online shop seeing as they're inexplicably still pretty cheap for the most part, and generally seem to have stood the test of time - keeping in mind that they weren't pretending to be anything other than kid's comics. One of those I've not yet read is an old Fantastic Four annual which I picked up mainly because it ties in with the Days of Future Present story which ran though a couple of the X-Men books. I had a quick look at the thing when it came in the mail: the Fantastic Four are back from some previous adventure to discover the Baxter Building mysteriously transformed, and this isn't even a Fantastic Four with which I am familiar because the line-up includes the She-Hulk, a female version of the Thing, and Ben Grimm back in human form. I'm sure it will prove to be be ludicrous, brightly coloured, and with far too many thought bubbles and villains announcing what they plan to do, but even now I'm more intrigued to find out what goes on in that story and why the Thing has tits than I was by anything in 1234. Back when I was a full-time Marvel zombie, I recall Grant Morrison getting misty-eyed over the weirdness of comics in the sixties, notably that one where the Flash spends an entire issue of his own book as a paving slab; and in comic book terms, 1234 leaves me longing for the weirdness, not to mention all the stupid, colourful fun, of the late eighties.
It's not a bad book, but - well, you know…
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