Fantastic 4 - Antithesis!

Fantastic Four - Antithesis is the final published work of the late great Neal Adams. I am proud to be able to have and hold so much great work by an outstanding and important artist in my collection. The story was written by Mark Waid. 

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD SO TREAD WITH CARE. 

The creative team of Waid and Adams are joined by inker Mark Farmer who does a remarkable job taming the pencils and giving them a nifty polish. The story begins with the Fab 4 battling Annihilus yet again. Once they've mopped him up and sent him scuttling back into the Negative Zone, one of Reed's many machines issues a warning about an object entering Earth's atmosphere and posing a threat, so the team combine their powers ingeniously and deflect it. Turns out it was the Silver Surfer all along. (Not like the cover wasn't a tip-off.)

A wounded Surfer is in need of fixing and warns that Galactus is no more, having been defeated by a powerful enemy called Antithesis who emerged from the Negative Zone and absorbed the might of Galactus making him merely Galan, the mortal man he once was, again before tossing him into the Negative Zone. The FF race to save him, and of course have to battle Annihilus yet again and end up on the mighty ship of Galactus. 

Galen arranges to give the Fantastic Four the Power Cosmic which they use to confront the forces of Antithesis and the monster himself. They succeed in defeating him and send him packing into the Negative Zone, hopefully returning the power to Galen so he can become Galactus once again. But it turns out Reed ends up the power cosmic (didn't see that coming) and world eating has a whole new name. 

Mister Fantastic / Galactus plans to starve himself and end the threat for all time. But Sue ain't having it and she and the team along with the Surfer and Galen go to Whisper Hill to enlist the aid of Agatha Harkness. They lure the Reed/Galactus hybrid to them and then reminds him of his children. This proves to be the right move and he surrenders the power back to Galen, and the Surfer and the new improved  Galactus head back into the cosmos. The improvement is a bit of compassion for the people of the worlds he encounters. 

SPOILERS HAVE COMPLETED. 

Once again, the Fab 4 have saved the day with a combination of bravery, smarts, and the proper application of superpowers. It's just what you want in a Fantastic Four yarn. The artwork is lush, and the storytelling works almost all the time. This final published comic story produced by Neal Adams is a worthy contribution to his legacy. 

The four-issue run of this FF story was deemed a little too slight to run as a trade itself. It clocks in at around eighty pages, so we get couple of choice more vintage reprints such The Uncanny X-Men #65 which proved to the last of the Neal Adams issues on that venerated run,and told the story of an alien invasion. This invasion was anticipated and so gave an excuse to revive Professor X, who had been dead for a bit. Denny O'Neil is the scripter. That's Marie Severin's work on the cover. 

We are also treated to the first issue of the Fantastic Four by Waid and artists Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel. This was the last time I paid regular attention to the team, and I enjoyed the late Wieringo's work very much. 

All in a dandy little package and a great way to enjoy the work of a master. Look out for more than a few more Neal Adams posts as the year rumbles along. 

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The Rocketeer Meets The Spirit!

The Rocketeer and The Spirit - Pulp Friction will have to be put into the missed opportunity section. Mark Waid creates a nifty story featuring the still largely experimental technology of television to bring together the sunny flying hero from California and the shadowy hard-bitten hero from Central City. The Spirit was the creation of Will Eisner arguably the finest comic book creator of all time, while the Rocketeer was the creation of Dave Stevens, one of the finest comic artists of his or any generation. 
Their milieus could not be more different. 

What brings them together is a murder, the murder of an alderman from Central City whose body turns up on the beaches of California in an impossible timeframe. Betty found the body and so becomes embroiled in this tale of corporate greed and government corruption. Cliff Secord is trying his best to keep her safe despite the fact she often seems more concerned with her career and with the Spirit's muscles. She meets the latter when he, Commissioner Dolan and his daughter Ellen fly to California to identify the body. The crime boss, a powerful businessman named Trask is in partnership with the Spirit's old nemesis the Octopus. Together they want to get control of the new technology of television with its potential for reaching the masses. It seems this technology has other uses as well which proves of interest to foreign powers. 

Paul Smith is the artist of the first installment and it's outstanding, offering up a nigh believable story which commands the reader's attention. Smith has always had an attractive style which is well suited to drawing dames such as Betty. Unfortunately for whatever reason Smith only draws the first issue and is replaced by Loston Wallace on the second. Wallace is an old internet colleague and once did some work for an early Yahoo group I managed for a time. I like his work immensely, but it seems a bit less dynamic here than I'd have hoped. The third and fourth issues are drawn by Jay Bone, a dandy artist, but one with a style much different than what had come before. There is nothing wrong with any single episode on its own, but the clash of styles does not do the storytelling any favors. It's a pity Smith couldn't have done all four issues. 

Below are the covers. The first and second issues are by the late Darwyn Cooke. Jay Bone does a bang- up job on the final two. 

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The Rocketeer - Cargo Of Doom!

Hidden behind a rather lackluster and generic cover, the story of The Rocketeer - Cargo of Doom is actually quite an exciting fast-paced adventure with more than enough peril for our hero and his allies. Mark Waid and artist Chris Samnee tell a tale which grows out of threads from the original Dave Stevens yarn and gives us a peek at more ties to other fictional creations. 

Our villain this time is direct from the pages of Doc Savage and though his name is never uttered, John Sunlight proves to be an antagonist who demands the most from our hero Cliff. Working in alliance with some unseen crime lord, Sunlight brings a shipment of dinosaurs from Skull Island to Los Angeles. And of course, they escape to wreak havoc in the city. With a few new allies, Rocketeer takes the battle to Sunlight because the latter has also managed to get his hands on the Rocketeer's rocket. 

Chris Samnee's artwork is exceedingly nice, and he does a great job of displaying the action. How the Rocketeer finally manages to subdue the prehistoric threats is more than a tad far-fetched, but then this is a story filled with dinosaurs, so far-fetched seems par for the course. 

Below are the covers for this 2013 series from IDW Publishing. 

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Kingdom Come!

In my universe comic books exist BAR and AAR, that is Before Alex Ross and After Alex Ross. Ross with his paintings made the Marvel Universe look new and fresh again, even when he was rendering it oldest components. The only artist who had the same impact to my mind was Neal Adams who a generation or more before had brought to the page his bold illustrative stylings. Ross upped the ante on realism but to my falls short in the area of dynamics. Don't get me wrong, by and large I love the work of Alex Ross and followed Astro City through all its publishers and incarnations in no small part due to the paintings Ross did for each and every cover. But when I read a Ross story (and not just stare lovingly at one of his covers) my eye sometimes lost and clarity of detail which I know must be there gets washed out by the complexity of an image. 

Nonetheless Ross is the perfect candidate to work with Mark Waid on Kingdom Come, a rather grim look at a possible DCU future in which Superman has been swept aside for someone more hip and sadly much more dangerous. He and the other heroes have fallen away as a new more brutal and less empathetic generation of characters take to the streets to fight crime and each other with a wild abandon that often caused as much harm as good. The morality of doing good seemed to have become radicalized and made for dangerous super types of all sorts. In this story a good man becomes gifted with the ability to see the future, a gift he inherited from Wesley Dodds the Sandman, and this man a preacher by trade is led by the Spectre to scene after scene of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and others attempting to deal with crisis brought on by a "hero" named Mangog who caused nuclear devastation in the center of the United States bread basket, effectively irradiating the state of Kansas and regions beyond. In the face of this calamity the veteran heroes return to the playing field and attempt to bring order. And that's just the beginning as efforts to bring justice and peace prove much more difficult. 

Here are the original covers. 

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The Life Story Of The Flash!

The Life Story of The Flash is a most unusual book. It's not a comic book completely but neither is it a prose book entirely. It's a hybrid unlike anything I've ever seen. Writers Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn cover the whole history (to that point since the book came out in 1997) of Barry Allen the Flash. It was an odd time for such a book since Barry Allen had not been the Flash for quite a time. The story is told as if written by Iris Allen, Barry Allen's longtime girlfriend and wife before she was seemingly killed, but who turned out to not be dead at all but merely in the future with her real parents. Now that will fill a dust jacket. 

The main attraction for me with this book is the artwork which is done primarily by Gil Kane but who in the later stages gives way to Joe Staton inked by Tom Palmer. By artwork I mean actual comic book pages as well as illustrations. This  book moves back and forth from prose with spot illustrations (imitating photos at times) to becoming full-fledge multi-panel comic stories which can run several pages. The transition from one format to the other is the greatest narrative challenge of his hybrid creation and sadly it's not always successful as the font sizes of the one don't match the other. But still the art does shine. 

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