5 Things to Like About Fantastic Four: True Story #1

Paul Cornell does it again. I was always a fan of his Doctor Who work, both in print and on the screen, and then he made me a believer in his comics work as well with his Captain Britain work. And now, with Fantastic Four: True Story, despite the fact that I currently have no interest in the monthly FF series. Five reasons why:

1. It's about literatureIf you love Fables (and you should), you should really be up for a story that uses the great works of fiction as its canvas. Something is threatening to destroy great literature and the FF have to go into the Domain of Human Story created by our collective unconscious. With Dante as their guide. And the first stop is clobberin' time in Sense and Sensibility. Just check out that nice Meanwhile caption.

2. Sue is the key
I don't know what it is about me, but I like it when the runt of the litter makes good. I like it when Bouncing Boy wins the day, when it's all down to Kitty Pryde, when Vancouver makes it to the Stanley Cup. And Sue Richards is that character in the FF, even after they gave her the force fields, even after they stopped calling her a Girl. In a team with a genius, a strongman and a human furnace, it's hard for an invisible woman to shine, but here she does. She's the reader of the lot. She's the one with a spiritual life and an aesthetic sensibility. So she's the one to crack this case wide open.

3. Reality check!
Cornell knows he's using fictional characters to explore a fictional space, so following in the footsteps of Animal Man and the bulldozer trails of Ambush Bug, the FF are treated as fictional in the story itself (they're in denial though). For example, they're suddenly aware of comic book transitions and can read word balloons, and Cornell uses the comic to play with FF clichés in a meta-fictional way.

4. Reed as the Doctor
This is one the most perfect Reed Richards panel ever. On paper, Reed IS quite a bit Doctorish, isn't he? So I don't mind the characterization at all. Not if he thinks nothing of creating new fields of human endeavor like it ain't no thing.

5. The comedy
Cornell has a lot of fun with FF history and long-standing clichés, using humor to either lovingly highlight it or lovingly lampoon it. There's practically at least one joke that'll make you smile on each page. Willie Lumpkin keeping his Silver Age running gag going, the usual bickering between the Torch and the Thing taken to the meta-textual level, great lines like "Johnny, just for once, could your brain participate in the life of your mouth?"... The FF have never worked so well as a comedy. It's not all highbrow postmodernism either: A giant monster gets hit in the junk.