DEATH IN THE FF4
Jonathan Hickman has led an enduring run for the first family of Marvel and has persevered in teasing us as to the game-changer that hit stands today. Speculation grew rife and I personally nailed it head on with the fallen member, but all the attention and choruses of praise isn't due to the fact that a team member was randomly killed, or for shock value...it's akin to Steve Rogers in Civil War...it's the end-product and resultant of vectors of threads intersecting at junctions that set the standard for what a high quality FF4 book needs to be. This death is meaningful and it's exactly what the book called for...it shakes readers of the arc to the core, and despite a sombre feel, it's a rapturous way for the fallen team member to go out...
Hickman's derivations, progressive sciences and radical notions set each team member on courses that were strewn with malicious cores of danger and woe, and his entwined style of building puzzles upon puzzles, coupled with mysterious flow-charts and diagrams, makes him the ideal scribe for this book and the man to take this title forward. As seen from his 'S.H.I.E.L.D' issues, he concocts mesmerizing loops and cycles of endless awe with crests of mystery and troughs of eloquence battered with earth-shattering impending doom. It's never gory but it's weary a setting he paints, with the environments of Nu-World, The Deep Seas, The Baxter Building, and Outer Space all mastered elegantly by Steve Epting. It's remarkable how impacting they manage to set this book out as with crushing predicaments and onslaughts entangling all members of the team in their respective ecosystems.
Epting marvelously improves on his Captain America run as he and Hickman outdo the likes of Millar, Waid, and Eaglesham on art. It's the dark yet undiluted tone that is painted vividly yet with a boorish sense of hopelessness that is needed to depict the inevitable tragedy. The inking and basic layouts are impeccable, with the colors accentuating Epting's pencils that shone brightly under Brubaker's titles. The postures and body structure are all synonymous with on-screen magnetic poses and charisma that Hollywood failed to deliver in the FF4 films, and Epting kicks up a majestic artistic storm to knock it out the park. Hickman's script is plotted to flawless perfection as Reed struggles to escape the Nu-World, along with its refugees, from the thralls of a bitterly enraged Galactus, while Susan Storm's undersea interactions came close to stealing the issue - as her physical prowess compliments her beauty, resilience and knack for justice in the most profound manner. In these exchanges, Namor professes what we'd expect straightforwardly...yet it comes off as a masterstroke and genius masterpiece. Epting's smile on Namor...summed it up...this no doubt shows the issue for what it is...full of heart and soul...and heroic endeavors.
With Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm ensuring the Annihilation Wave does not seep through the Baxter Building, it's the Future Foundation and Franklin Richards that shows how well Hickman uses the ensemble cast and rotates them with sheer aptitude and adamant accuracy, giving every single player enough air-time, despite lingering the issue around a death. Get that straight...it isn't based around a death...the death comes as a result of all the machinations of the heroics of the lifesavers in this run. Hickman plays off everyone's strengths here, with Franklin and Valeria ensuring fodder for the future books with nuclear intent.
Alas, the panache of Johnny Storm comes full-circle as we see scenes a la 'Armageddon'...Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck seemed to influence this a bit...but nonetheless, it isn't corny or clichéd...it's emphatically splendid as Storm shows the daring hero that other writers downright failed to capture since Storm's 'Civil War' bashings. Storm sacrifices himself as Ben Grimm looks on with the children of the Richards...all to ensure that Earth is saved from the Annihilation Wave. The gusto and endearing panels showing Grimm watching his 'brother' succumb to the forces of terror are heartbreaking to those fans of this book...as loyalty is painted to the fullest on this tapestry. It's a bolstering scene to see Grimm revert to his rock form which may have well made him the ideal man to make the save, yet it's too little...too late and nothing is worse than being too late...it's irony and a swelling of sadness. The melancholy overture emanates as there's the definite vacuum to be left with Storm's demise amidst the onrushing deluge of peril; and it's his moral compass that outstands and reverberates with infinite plausibility - it surprises no one to see Storm display the ultimate act of Love and Sacrifice. It's well woven and a collage of emotions as Grimm's left grasping and gripping the younglings, in tears, with Johnny Storm making his last stand - guns blazing in a flame of glory.
The repercussions and eulogies come in FF4 #588 and any ramifications are definitely best handled by Hickman. The aftermath is one I'm eager for just as much as this issue as Reed and Sue still lay not knowing the fate of the Human Torch, as well as other AVENGER associates, namely Spiderman. Hickman takes this scientific tale and makes it one of loyalty, trust, brotherhood, adolescence, innocence and touches all modern themes that ensure the impasse bodes from the nostalgic spectrum to the inner core of the human soul. It's a relevant tale sloped around the main theme of 'Family' on a scale that measures highly within the visceral base of the human concept of understanding emotion.
It ensures that much is left to expand on and embark post-Johnny's death...and while #588, the last issue of FF4, in February, leading to FF #1 in March, remains a requiem for our fallen hero - it's an understatement to say that Storm's sacrifice will not be forgotten or in vain. It's a significant fall in the Heroic Age and with one heroic daredevil less entering 'Fear Itself'...Hickman and Epting definitely did a rave book that remains critically acclaimed a run in my eyes, and all the attention this book and this incident got...FULLY IS DESERVED! They are the best duo creating on this title that I've read in quite sometime...and as Johnny Storm leaves the Marvel U today...fans of Marvel will resonate that...his FLAME WILL BURN ON...
Rating = 10 /10