Is 2 in 1 Better Than 4?
The Fantastic Four are dead. Long live the Fantastic Four. The wise amongst you are aware on some level that the only constant in this life is change, and that nothing lasts forever. And so when megalomaniac Marvel decided to kill off their first family during the Secret Wars incursions we were all left wondering how they were going to inevitably bring back the Fantastic Four. This was probably just some kind of fixed term deposit/timeshare deal, because the wheels of commerce tend to turn mercilessly, and the monopoly machine knew that it was only a matter of time before they owned all the rights and intellectual property they needed to sustain capitalism until our own world faced its inevitable impending implosion. We still don’t know how Reed, Sue and the kids will be reinserted into the existing Marvel multiverse/universe/whatever they’re calling it these days, but it will happen. In the interim, we can check out Marvel 2 in 1 Thing and the Human Torch.
We’re all patting ourselves on the back as we ponder the immense power that nostalgia can wield over those who cherish a bygone ideal, tale or even an emotion. Is that a consolation or an acknowledgement of our shared awareness? I leave that to you, gentle reader, to decide.
You’re clearly curious about Marvel 2 in 1, or wondering what other readers thought. Maybe my opinion comes from having been off comics for a while (strange enough for someone who ‘maintains’ a comic blog), but this felt familiar and friendly. Would you call this a safe read? Yeah, why not. The first 2 issues are full of familiar faces and places and literary devices that writer Chip Zdarsky and others have undoubtedly put out before. But the human is indeed a complex animal, with a potential to harm and also to heal, and while I’ll give this story a thumbs up, others might flip it off.
There is enough luscious art in these pages courtesy of Jim Cheung, John Dell, Walden Wong and Frank Martin to satisfy your everyday aesthete, while the story will have haters, and lovers in equal measure. I consider myself more on the latter, but not completely. There’s enough to make you turn the pages and resist the urge to pick up a PS4 controller and game instead of putting down ideas onto a page and writing a blog post about it, at least in my case. Others will disagree, but I couldn’t find anything I disliked about these 2 issues, and would happily recommend you reading them. I can understand why some people might not buy these books — on principle and because of simple economics. Don’t work overtime just to be able to buy each issue, I’m sure it’ll be just as much fun to read as a collected omnibus.
