What I Bought 8/12/2026 - Part 1

In yet another example of my spectacular timing, I managed to schedule a week off during the hottest week of the year. It's been a billion damn degrees out there everyday since Sunday, and will apparently continue for another two days. And when it cools off, I'm back at work, and covering for Bill as he goes on another week-long fishing trip.

In addition to the two books from this week, the local guy had another book on the shelves that wasn't there last week. I guess somebody didn't want to pay for the anniversary issue. Can't say I blame them, really. A decent chunk of the additional pages are pages or covers from notable prior issues of FF (as in, the original pages, whether by Kirby, Byrne, Buscema, etc.), but with Ramos adding in the current bunch watching invisibly. Yes, that is underwhelming.

Fantastic Four #15, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - The green monster from the cover of the first issue of FF made the cover. Not Annihilus, Mole Man, Namor, any of the team's various allies and replacements, but that big monster, yes. That's the sort of thing that would really annoy the Wizard.

A scullery maid contemplates the dreary nature of her life, when four strangely dressed people appear out of thin air, asking for her help to keep them from moving backwards in time. Yes, North is doing another FF story centered around time travel. Man's going to wear a footpath through timestream at this rate.

Nicholas Scratch - North has used him twice now, but Diablo can't get any run - has figured out temporal magic and reversed the FF's flow, so they're moving backwards. They need an electrical charge and something really cold to disrupt the effect and get them moving the right way again. Also, I'm not sure how Sue is using her power to induce an encounter with regular time, as Reed puts it. Or why, if they're moving backwards through time, they aren't also speaking backwards from the maid's perspective.

The maid, Clarina Canady, is extremely chill about all this. Especially given one of them is a big rock guy. But she's stoked at the idea a woman can be a natural philosopher, aka a scientist, so she spends 20 years working on something to create a charge, waiting for the FF to pop up earlier, from their perspective, in their journey. Reed's able to give Clarina more info about the cold-producing device, and she works on that for another 20 years. But the FF don't show up, and she somehow figures out that their meeting her in her past is messing up where they appeared in her future.

I don't follow, but let's roll with it, as Clarina spends the last 20 years of her life designing a primitive airship that can hold her and the things she built to help the FF. She does, their time starts flowing the right direction, and her heart gives out. The FF make the aforementioned trip back through a handful of specific moments in their history, confront Scratch again, and Johnny knocks him out by pretending to be the mindless copy Scratch had unleashed to initially lure them in. But to sell it, he had to get rid of his mustache, which has to be just about the clearest sign North's run is wrapping up, if he's putting things back to factory standard.

Also, for some reason the sleeves of their outfits are a different color (black) when she meets them the last time than in her first two encounters (blue.) But then, when they reappear moments after Scratch sent them away, the sleeves are blue, and only the gloves are black.