Fantastic Four #571 (Marvel – Hickman / Eaglesham)
Reed continues his quest to right all wrongs while Ben and Johnny prepare for a trip to Nu-Earth. Val figures out what her dad is up to and Sue wants to know “is that an ultimate nullifier in your pocket?” All that and a world-eater before breakfast! Part two of SOLVE EVERYTHING.
Marvel’s blurb of this is pretty misleading. If I had read that first I would have thought “WTH?” and would have went into the issue not expecting much. Jonathan Hickman does much the opposite and gives the reader almost too much.
The set up of this arc is that Reed has found a group of alternate “Reeds” that work with one another, and work outside of the physical boundaries of the known universe and solve ultimate problems – just to name a few: universal hunger and poverty, stopping and infinite number of Galactuses and what to do with a multiverse-ful of Doom’s who no matter what universe he is from is dead set on conquering the world and destroying Reed… This is in essence a “Reed-Corps” that is powered by several Infinity Guantlets. And the only limits that the Reed-Corps have is the limits of their collective imagination… so none.
This is a great premise and could drawn out and used as an over-arcing idea over a long period of time I think. Heck, since our Reed’s ultimate goal is to undo the Dark Reign event and fix everything, this sort of premise could easily fall into other series and have big Marvel Universe impact. Instead, the premise, explanantion and what seems like the demise of the Reed Corps all happen in this issue. Apparently the Celestials are hip on a bunch of Reeds deciding how the multiverse should run and attack at the end of the issue. So, while this was very creative, fun and entertaining (still being within the boundaries of FF mythilogy) it seems that this storyline will die within a few issues and hopefully Hickamn will have something equally delightful to give us.
Issue Grade: B
