The first volume in this series started out pretty good. We have the Fantastic Four, minus Human Torch, plus Spider-Man. We also have a bunch of Reed Richards-ses that come from other dimensions, all of whom decided at some point to abandon their families in order to do what’s best for the world, which kind of means they lost any anchor to emotional reality and therefore became a group of dangerous sociopaths.
I can dig it.
Then we have the second volume.
The phrase “a lot going on” can either be really great or really bad.
Examples:
“There is a lot going on in that novel.” Could be great because there’s cool subtext, could be shit because dragons and man-eating plants just showed up for no real reason.
“She’s got a lot going on right now.” Could be someone with a career that’s on fire or someone who is learning how to live life in a wheelchair.
“There’s a lot going on at the office.” Could be that business is brisk, could be that the pop machine is out of Brisk Iced Tea, could be that someone briskly shot everyone on a Tuesday. Kind of depends on who is telling the story.
When I say “there’s a lot going on” in the second volume, I mean it in the bad, dragons, man-eating plants, wheelchair, office shooting kind of way.
A reasonable, paced story turns into about seventeen stories. No less than SIX other races show up within these pages. Characters I’ve never seen before duck in and out for no apparent reason. And in the end a war for humanity is fought…by the Inhumans. There’s a group of kids who might be scientists, one of whom appears to be somehow related to the devil. Oh, and how could I forget this key plot point: THERE’S A MAGIC SEED!
I have a couple of explanations that could describe how this volume feels.
It kind of feels like your five year-old little brother read every Fantistic Four comic written from 1970 to 1979 and then breathlessly summarized them for you, using character names as though they are people you are familiar with and leaving you feeling like he must have left out HUGE plot points and may need to be evaluated to make sure his schooling is addressing all of his special needs.
It kind of feels like someone came up with eight years worth of storylines, then was told he had 4 issues to write, and then instead of picking one decided to just jam them all in to see if he could, like jamming a bunch of dum-dums in a phone booth.
It kind of feels like I read the first volume, then the eighth volume. Ten years later. With a somewhat alarming fever.
Well, you get it. Which is to say, I don’t get it.
But please, if you explain your story to someone and it has a magic seed in it that grows a weird floating head with four eyes
…eh, evaluate whether a genie would be appropriate to this world and use that as your guide.