One Foe To Create Them All

 

Getting in under the wire before reaching the end of Avengers Vol. 1 was the release of the book's 400th issue, a last hurrah of Earth's Mightiest Heroes before the team becomes engulfed in the coming of Onslaught. (Perhaps the less said about Onslaught, the better.) Written by Mark Waid with art by Mike Wieringo and Tom Palmer, this mid-1996 tale's wraparound cover by Mike Deodato might give you the impression that you're in for another villains! villains! villains! anniversary issue--yet the story provides a clever twist which, as the Avengers series reaches its end, would fittingly bring the book and the team full circle.

On the streets of New York, the Avengers are facing the first foray of this new danger in the form of the original Masters of Evil; but to begin to understand the nature of it, we must return to Avengers Mansion where the residence/headquarters' butler, Jarvis, encounters a traveler who brings dire warnings from the future of not only the coming deaths of the Avengers, but also the end of the world.

Crisis From The Stars!

 

Having remembered writer Mark Waid's Fantastic Four run from the early 2000s, I was not only intrigued at seeing him take up work on the title again fifteen years later, but also surprised to learn that distinguished artist Neal Adams would also be aboard for Waid's four-issue series, which debuted in October of 2020.

I believe the last pages I remember seeing from Adams during his time at Marvel was his War Of The Worlds work from Amazing Adventures #18 in 1973. If I'm not mistaken, Adams' only work depicting the FF (three of them, at any rate) took place in Avengers #93, when a trio of Skrulls took their form to attack the assemblers (with Adams doing a few cutaway panels of the real McCoys in a subsequent issue). Having plied his craft with the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Inhumans, the FF would elude Adams for forty-nine years before finally landing on his drawing board as a full-fledged project--which was bound to make even those like myself, who had all but ceased reading new Marvel work, more than curious about the finished product.

This first installment of Waid's story is geared to build momentum for whatever challenge the FF will face, with much of it featuring the group in action against not one but two more immediate threats, the latter of which will be related to what is to come. The story's overriding theme, "antithesis"--literally, the opposite or contrast of one thing in relation to another--could mean anything at this point; the only thing we know for now, thanks to the cover, is that it will involve the Silver Surfer, who has returned to the service of Galactus. Obviously the Surfer is in bad shape, and the FF don't seem to be responsible for his condition--but we'll have to wait and see what we learn as things take shape.

As for that first threat, a character which fits that bill is surely Annihilus, the fiend from the Negative Zone who has once more broken through to our world with intentions toward conquest and death.

 

The Fantastic Four Are On The Job!

We've reached the end of our week-long look at the various titles which rode the wave of the Avengers: Disassembled stories from 2004, adding the distinctive DISASSEMBLED banner to their mastheads even if their plots had little to nothing to do with what was happening in The Avengers. But though the Avengers are indeed in dire straits, there yet remains another super-group in New York City, one that used to be the standard-bearer for Marvel Comics and whose book is still going strong at this point in time--and along with a number of other prominent characters, they show up on the Avengers' doorstep during their crisis, which is likely the reason alone that the crossover banner is tacked onto their book's title.  Nevertheless, writer Mark Waid has an interesting and even nostalgic way of associating the book with the Avengers story, one that will again assure New Yorkers why they can always count on the Fantastic Four.

The Yellow Stick Of God

Some of you reading comics during the early 2000s may remember writer Mark Waid's run on Fantastic Four, when the FF were in their "Imaginauts" phase. Valeria Richards... Johnny becoming the CFO of FF, Inc., as well as the herald of Galactus... the sci-fi masthead... the team laying claim to Latveria... the A.I. falling in love with Reed... the trip to Heaven...

Whoa, back up a sec, you say. The what?

A very interesting run, yes. At times an uncomfortable one. The FF were looking rather--cartoonish, for lack of a better word. Almost caricatures of themselves. Far less serious, though far more family-oriented. I found myself drawn into these stories in spite of myself. I wasn't crazy about the action sequences, with Reed's pasta-like stretching and other distractions; the team didn't look in fighting form, if that makes sense. But the relationships between the characters made for enjoyable, if whimsical, reading.

And there was that trip to Heaven, to recover Ben's soul.

And the Fantastic Four's meeting with the Almighty.

Yes, that Almighty.

It's easy to get the impression from all this that the FF had lost their edge. But surprisingly, Waid kept a tight grip on what made these characters work--and when tension and desperate battle conditions were needed, the FF were there in all the ways that mattered, resulting in some fine stories that rank right up there. Yet it's fair to say that these FF issues were very much under the radar--and that's unfortunate.

For instance, the sequence where the FF meet God comes on the tail end of a very good story that cements the bond between Ben and Reed, though it has the team on the verge of tearing itself apart. But when all is said and done, they're given a last leg to their trip that comes as something of a surprise, to say the least:

Are you?