What I Bought 8/4/2025 - Part 3

I'm taking most of this week off. From work, I mean. Not the blog. Never the blog. The blog is life. The blog is everything. . .

Where was I? It's Fantastic Four and adjacent books day!

Fantastic Four #1, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (artist), Victor Olazaba (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - I got the Cliff Chiang variant. Same price as the regular cover, so why not?

The FF have their powers back and are taking the fight to Doom (still Emperor of the World, being carried down the boulevard on a throne by a bunch of Doombots.) Doom gets annoyed enough, he casts each member of the team through time, where they'll have to find certain crystals and stop horrible monsters from - no, wait, that was the TimeSplitters' games.

Johnny's over 500 million years into the past, with oxygen levels 20% of today's. Ben's under attack from dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Large ones, not a pack of velociraptors or something of the size you'd expect would team up to kill something his size. Ramos also sticks to the classic "scaly lizard" look. Not sure I've seen a comic artist that drew dinosaurs with feathers yet. Ramos does seem to have dialed back the "dislocated jaw" exaggerated anatomy I remember, which is nice. Maybe drawing characters less prone to acrobatics than Spider-Man got him to rein it in.

Reed's somewhere in Europe during the 1200s, and doesn't it just figure Reed gets sent to the time it would be easiest to survive. Even Doom is giving Accursed Richards the best hand. The team's plan seems to rest on some piece of rock they call the Forever Stone, some piece of rock that Reed's somehow kept track of its location throughout history. Each team member marks their time period and initial, and you can find them. if you have a time machine.

Too bad three-quarters of the team are in the past, and Sue's so far in the future the Sun's about to swallow the planet. The "forever" stone doesn't even seem to exist, let alone any way to get home. So everybody's going to die, most of them soon. Except Reed, who gets to live out his existence in the Middle Ages. Relatively speaking, everything's coming up roses for him. I assume the workaround is Alicia and the kids saw what happened, went to the Forever Stone in the present, and will mount a rescue of the ones they can find.

The Thing #3, by Tony Fleecs (writer), Justin Mason (artist), Alex Sinclair (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I can't see Diamondback taking part in trying to kill the Thing, I don't care how big a bounty Kingpin put on him.

The warehouse exploded, but the missing girl, Sara, emerges unharmed, which is suspicious. No sign of Marty, but Ben's got to get the kid clear of Hammerhead and Bullseye, who tries throwing a license plate at the Thing at one point. At least Fleecs isn't going out of his way to make Bullseye look smart. 

Fisk puts a big bounty on the Thing's head, which brings us up to the point where the mini-series started. Sara needed to rest, so they take a breather on a rooftop. Too bad a big orange rock guy is pretty conspicuous, so Ben wakes up to find himself under attack by the Wrecking Crew!

Who he handles pretty easily. Not as easily as Bullseye, but it feels like Fleecs is writing is as though all the power is in Wrecker's crowbar. Which I know is magic, or enchanted, but he's pretty strong without it, I thought. He fights Thor, solo. Granted, he always loses, but it's not a cakewalk for ol' Goldilocks. The others aren't on the same level, but they aren't just regular guys. But I guess the point is that Ben's not going to hold back against guys who don't mind attacking him while he's trying to protect a kid, and that means they've got no chance.

Also feels like Mason went more cartoonish with his art in this issue, or maybe just looser with the pencils. Might be because the Thing spends most of the issue fighting, and that helps with the sense of movement and energy, or just the way the fight played out. The Thing swipes Wrecker's crowbar at one point, then clocks him in the face with it, and later throws it at the Crew as they run away and bonks Piledriver with it. The tone is a lot different from when he was trying to reason with Gladiator or Bullseye.