The first chapter of "Fantastic Four: World's Greatest" looks very much like the introductory issue of any another Mark Millar comic since "Civil War". There's an attention grabbing introduction to start matters off, an impressive and page-dominating example of spectacle to anchor the middle of the tale, and the story, as always, ends on a full-page cliffhanger which arrives pretty much out of the blue. And inbetween these sturdy and constant pillars of Millar's recurrent tripartite structure - intro/spectacle/cliffhanger - sit the connecting tissue of the mundane conversations, where characters in beautifully detailed and recognisably real-world environments deliver the plot and establish themselves as players of particular roles within the Millar-verse.
But Millar and Hitch's "World's Greatest: Part One" has a quite different effect upon the reader to the first chapters of his more recent work, such as "1985", "Old Man Logan", "Kick Ass", "Ultimate Avengers" and "Nemesis", despite its structure being every bit as Millar-esque as theirs. For where those books are saturated with jeopardy, or at the very least foreboding in the case of "1985", "World's Greatest" is a creature of relative calm. Where their protagonists are immediately faced with circumstances falling far beyond their control, "World's Greatest" assures the reader at every juncture that nothing can ever seriously go wrong while the Fantastic Four are in situ. And where many of the other first chapters end with a sense that the worst has already happened and nothing good can result from events here-in, "World's Greatest" closes with the sense that the promised end of world doesn't matter too much and, anyway, there's somewhere for everyone to go when and if it happens.
It's not just that Millar and Hitch set out to create an all-ages comic book that caused Fantastic Four # 554 to be such a pleasant and relatively limp curtain-opener, for it's quite possible to produce a superhero romp composed of threat and uneasy anticipation without straying into inappropriate excesses of sex and violence. (After all, that was what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby managed to do for 102 issues, and their example has been repeatedly referred to by Millar and Hitch as their primary inspiration.) Rather, it's was combination of a determination to produce a fundamentally more gentle comic book combined with some rather odd storytelling choices on the part of both writer and artist which resulted in the first chapter of Millar and Hitch's run being such a surprisingly passive and unengaging experience.
But, this doesn't mean that I'm going to argue that Fantastic Four # 554 is an entirely wasted opportunity by its creators, or that it's a comic book without interest or value for the reader. In fact, it's often a charming episode, and it's rarely less than a competently-created one. Yet a quiet charm and competence aren't qualities which drive marquee-headlining superhero books in the marketplace of the modern world, and they're certainly not the qualities which fans of Millar and Hitch's work on "The Ultimates" would associate with them. And so I can't help but think about that fall-off of around 25 000 readers that occured in 2008 between this issue and the next (*1), and of how many willing consumers found the experience of this series-opener to be so surprisingly mild that they began to disengage from the Fantastic Four almost immediately. Because "World's Greatest: Part 1" seems to promise its audience that nothing of too great a consequence is going to occur in future episodes, which, in combination with the matters we discussed in the last piece on this blog, may have caused for many the unexpected feeling that a Mark Millar comic book was going to be safe, and unexciting, over-familiar and nostalgic.
Which is, of course, not what many if any comic book readers are going to associate with the Millar brand at all.
*1 - according to http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2008.html
It's an impression which is established on the tale's very first page, which is a pleasant and unremarkable group pin-up which tells the audience absolutely nothing new, beyond the fact that Sue Storm's costume is now armless. (Very fetching it is too.) But for a writer so dedicated to getting the reader immediately involved with each new story on the very first page, it's an odd choice of attention-grabber; there's nothing innovative or particularly dynamic about this take on these very familiar characters, which makes it look from the off as if these stories are going to be more of the same rather than the promised break with the recent past. (In such a way can Mr Millar's knowing snakeoil salesman act counter-productively raise expectations.) And that staid impression given by the traditional take on the group pin-up is then reinforced by the following three-page teaser, which at first glance appears to be action-packed, but which on second is anything but, because no-one shown on the page seems to care very much about the danger at hand at all, and certainly nobody seems to feel threatened. (The Richard's children squabble and jostle as if they're on an outing to Brighton in the family saloon, which in a sense they are, despite being trapped in the past, chased by Native Americans and heading for another train charging directly in their direction.)
Miller's teasers are always deliberately used to establish what the comic in hand is going to be about, and they're always constructed to snare the reader's attention with unanswered questions. Even in the relatively quiet beginning to "1985", the peaceful introductory splash showing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at work in the Marvel offices of the early Sixties is tagged with a caption which questions whether their creations were truly imaginary, and, straight after that still beginning, the reader is presented with a garish and kinetic four-colour re-cap of "Secret Wars". (This is a story about how comic books and their myths intrude into the real world.) In "Old Man Logan", the teaser is only a page long, but in those four panels we're shown a utterly broken Wolverine and told the legends about how he utterly disappeared from the superhero-less world. (This is a story about what defeated Logan and how he got his mojo back.) "Kick-Ass" kicks off with a mentally disordered man dressed in a superhero costume leaping off a skyscraper. (This is a black comedy about ordinary folks attempting to live up to the superhuman tradition in an absurd fashion.) "Nemesis" lays before us a "real-world" terrorist super-villain slaughtering policemen, and many more besides. (This is a story about Batman gone bad and hunting down policemen rather than criminals.) And "Ultimate Avengers" is even more informing, though more quietly done, for once the story is over, we'll know that everything turned on the Nick Fury in those first 5 pages, who'd been locked out of his position of influence over America's super-humans as much as he was the Triskelion. Plot, theme and tone, therefore, are immediately established within an exciting and curiosity-inspiring context as a matter of course in Millar's introductions.
But not in "World's Greatest", where we're essentially shown something of a meaningless holiday jaunt for most of the Richards extended family. And with the specifics of the Fantastic Four's journey into the past undisclosed, and considering the fact that it all bears no relation on future stories, we're left with a slight dash of colour and noise that actually delays the beginning of the story rather than accentuating its nature and purpose. Worse yet, where engaging the audience is concerned, there's nothing very exciting on show at all, meaning that this is not only an irrelevant distraction, but a dull one too. Yes, there are Native Americans charging after the FF, but none of them seem to be firing at their targets. In fact there's only one gun on show in the panel at 1:1, the only time we see the horseback warriors, and it's not being aimed at anything at all. (We won't even see the Native Americans at 1:3 in the background as Reed's steam-powered time-train races away, which diminishes any sense of urgency, or indeed purpose, in their presence on the page.) And wherever all the bullets in 1:2 are coming from, they're of no danger
at all to the train's inhabitants; Sue Richards is hardly raising an eyebrow to indicate the slightest effort involved in maintaining her force-field. Again, why have jeopardy which isn't actually jeopardy at all? And even on page 3, when Franklin Richards is spilled from the train after fighting with his sister, there's no great sign of distress from all concerned. With a single call from the Invisible Woman, Mr Fantastic calmly rescues his son with an elongated arm and never even tells his children off! And the on-coming train which we're told might hit that of the FF's? Well, we never really see it beyond the glow of the light it's projecting before itself, so we don't care. (Anyway, we've mostly all seen "Back To The Future Part 3", so we're familiar with the high concept, and many of us will have read the time-travel teaser to Millar's first solo Ultimate Fantastic Four tale too, a mini-epic far more tautly structured and exciting to watch.) And it's telling that when the Richard's time-train arrives home, crashing into the barriers at the Baxter Building, it's not tragedy that threatens, but comedy, as Ben is thrown improbably through the walls of the FF's HQ - supposedly designed by big-brain Richards himself - only to land pathetically at Johnny Storm's feet.
As a set-up for Ben Grimm's fall, it's distracting and time-consuming. As an adventure in itself, it's without purpose or danger. As a teaser for a new comic from a famous team, it runs the risk of being disastrous, because it offers nothing distinct from the fare which has, year after year, warmed the hearts of hard-core fans and quite failed to attract a wider audience. For what have the new readers found here? No sense of the story to come, but a promise, it seems, that whatever appears will be shallow, good-hearted and laid-back, that's it's going to be safe and unimaginative, and that it's going to be designed to actually reduce any prospect of excitement occurring.
None of which could have been the point, of course. But Mark Millar has trained his audience to read his comics as a Hollywood blockbuster would be understood, on the hoof and from fragmented and disparate sources of information. And the message here is clear; this isn't The Ultimates, or The Authority, or indeed anything that the audience had seen from Mr Millar since "The Superman Adventures" in the late 1990s, which at least had the virtue of being a quite excellent comic in a sea of superhero mediocrity. But 2008 was a very different place to be presented with what Mr Millar himself has called his "Silver-Agey" skills, given the fact that Millar and his various collaborators, including Mr Hitch, had helped to considerably raise the bar where superhero comics were concerned since then.
It wasn't that that teaser lacked the excess of "The Authority" that was the problem, of course, but that it offered nothing new or distinct to this new run of a longstanding and middle-ranking book. Millar and Hitch hadn't, it seemed, taken the FF and innovated the property as the audience had been assured they would. (Details were vague, and there was a great emphasis on the respect for tradition in interviews given, but change and excitement had certainly been promised too.) In a sense, and for the first time since Ultimate X-Men, "World's Greatest" saw Mark Millar falling behind the competition, including that offered by himself. And that disengagement from the purpose and content, if not the form, of his own writerly technique can be noted again in the climax of the tale.
Pretty much all Millar's tales end on a full-page cliffhanger, we know this, but what a disastrously uninspiring call-to-the-next-issue this one was. (You can see the scan directly below.) It's the oddest design for a blockbuster conclusion to a series-opening chapter, and it's almost as if it's been constructed to neuter whatever tension and anticipation the scene might possibly inspire. To the top right of the page, Allyssa Moy is declaring to Reed Richards that he's looking at an artificial Earth called Nu-World, and then she adds, without hyperbole or even exclamation mark, the statement that "This is where we're going when the Earth dies."
Now, that's a pretty dramatic sentence, and could be expected to serve as an intense enigma to inspire the reader to come back next month. Yet she's smiling when she says it, which immediately nullifies any sense that her proclamation carries any urgency at all. (We'll later discover that she's feeling both smug about her achievement in helping to create Nu-World and rather hopeful that she'll entice Reed back into an affair with her, which will help explain her smile. But all of that is counter-productive in a cliffhanger like this, which needs to hook and bite. And an end of the word declared with a smile without the slightest evidence of a threat isn't an end of the world at all.)
More deflating yet is the fact that Reed and his shadowed face in the foreground carries not the sense that some terrible Apocalypse might suddenly have been declared, but rather an expression similar to that of a weary middle-aged man who was heading for his bed before remembering that he's yet the walk the dog for the evening. And while I'm not suggesting that a scene showing hands raised before faces and weeping children dissolving in acid rain would've have been a better choice, the fact is that, once again, the text and art have combined to create a narrative inertia, a sense that nothing much in comic-book terms is going to happen, and that what has is of no real consequence at all.
Of all of Millar's full-page cliffhangers which close the first issues of his work in this period, only the last shot of the first "Old Man Logan" comes anywhere near the inertia and dullness of this, and there at least Hawkeye and Wolverine are setting off in the Spidey-buggy to cross an fearsomely bleak America ruled by super-villains. And if that splash of the two old superheroes in a car is less than enticing of itself, we've seen the map of the future America on the preceding double-page splash, marked by place-names such as "Doom's Lair" and "Pym's Cross", and we're as eager as Clint Barton to be off. But preceding the final splash of "World's Greatest" is a rare example of an uninspiring two-page panorama by Bryan Hitch, where the detail of the structures in the foreground clutter and crowd the composition and make it hard for the eye to take in the new planet being built in the background. Furthermore, where Mr Millar's scripts often "lock" the meaning of spectacular shots by asking for a recognisably human figure or two in the foreground to add some scale and interest, here the eye has to strain to catch any sight of the vehicle Richards is travelling on. It's all a sign that the compositional challenge of presenting a new Earth being built while making the process clear and informed by human interest hasn't quite been meet by Mr Hitch, and once again the story sags in a static two-page white elephant when the audience should be gasping and applauding. It certainly doesn't succeed in setting up the next page's declaration that a new world's being built because the old one's serving out its notice. It's just a building site, really, when it should be a scene of wonder.
Yet compare these choices in "World Greatest" with the final pages of other Millar works from 2008-2010 and the sheer atypicality of this Fantastic Four story becomes all the more obvious. From the gruesome closing shot of "Kick-Ass" bleeding out to that of Nemesis presenting the captured American President, elsewhere the reader is presented with surprise and jeopardy. And if an objection is offered that an all-ages book can't, and shouldn't, present such challenging scenes, then why couldn't the creative team have matched the more acceptable intensity of the devastated face of Captain America in "Ultimate Avengers" telling us that the Red Skull is his son, or even the shot of enthusiastic G.I.s anticipating a super-powered future in "War Heroes"? It's not that I'm suggesting that Millar and Hitch needed to have presented us with blood and guts, but rather that we needed some visible intensity of emotion created by a script which informed our anticipation with an enigma and a threat.
But just to hear the end of the world is coming at some unspecified time isn't frightening. (As Kay says in "Men In Black": "There's always an Arquillian Battle Crusier, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet...".) We've seen, for example, Galactus arrive time after time after time, and indeed he'll be back in just a few issues more in Millar and Hitch's run too. (We're so sated with the end of the world that we've even got separate and well-established narrative traditions for a whole raft of different Armageddons.) And the audience's over-familiarity with comic-book narratives must, of course, be one of the things that caused Mr Millar to develop his structural principles, whether he's articulated their existence in these terms or not. (He uses the same techniques pretty much every time, so I suspect he knows exactly what he's doing.) His cliffhangers surprise us and challenge us to ignore the fact that these rusty old narratives are still probably going to go according to plan in the end. He doesn't pretend that the heroes won't on the whole win and the bad guys get thumped, for Mr Millar is remarkably conservative, and pleasingly so, in how his stories are ended. But his cliffhangers do hold out the enticing prospect that a familiar destination may be reached by a less familiar path this time out.
Yet the ending of the first chapter in the "Fantastic Four: World Greatest" promised nothing at all, except that Reed had a hidey-hole for when this smile-inspiring end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it arrived. We were given no human dimension to ground this prophecy of doom, no vision of disaster or emotional response to give the situation a human context. Instead, there's a big new planet, and the bare promise of a big new disaster, and it all felt rather hoo-hum, to say the least.
And what could be less Mark Millar than that, and what could be less Bryan Hitch too?
All of which leaves me wondering whether the script for that first chapter wasn't written untypically swiftly, and whether it might not have been drawn in a less-than-ideal time-span too. For it's not that either the words or the pictures lack detail or skill, but the business of planning, whether as regards a third draft or an extra day sketching out roughs, could explain a great deal. Whatever. The truth is that the first Millar and Hitch "Fantastic Four" tripped over some structural problems of both script and composition, and the result was a comic book so obviously the product of its creative team, and yet so strangely not as well.
Of course, Mr Millar and Mr Hitch swiftly recaptured their previously well-exploited methods of capitalising on the opportunities offered by first and last pages in their "Fantastic Four" tales. A string of ever-intensifying cliffhangers followed # 554; the haunting low-angle shot of the giant Cap robot striding through a snowstorm while caught in the flashlight of Alaskan hunters; the appearance of a shattered Doom in the Baxter Building demanding Reed Richard's help; the sight of Von Doom bent over the slaughtered body of the Sue Storm from the future. And soon both writer and artist began to deliver the typical Millar mix of shock and super-heroics which has proved so effective for him and his collaborators. Similarly, Mr Hitch's work began to produce grand full-page, and even double-page, "spectacle-shots" with a human dimension to ground them, restoring a sense of scale and vulnerability to these superheroes who so typically dominate their environment elsewehre. (The shot of Reed Richard's Galactus-killer robot towering over all his flying comrades is particularly amusing, while the double-page spread of the slain Galactus in the New Defender's HQ is made all the more impressive by the tiny figures standing above it, and that mixture of the human and monumental scale renders even the shots of Ben flying the bath-tub Fantasticar over everyday NYC quite enchanting.)
But it's impossible to say how the lack of business as usual in the first part of "World's Greatest" hurt the sales of Miller and Hitch's "Fantastic Four", and indeed their previously ironclad reputation. According to Comichron, their book lost 25 000 sales in the single month after its first appearance on the stands, before stabilising at around the 60 000 mark, selling about a third more on average than it had under the previous team. Which was all quite acceptable, for there's nearly always a shedding of readers straight after a new team begins, but it wasn't what was expected, and certainly not what later stories in the run deserved. No, it's hard not to ask what might have happened if so many readers hadn't been lost so early, and if Millar and Hitch's "Fantastic Four" hadn't rather accumulated readers as their previous books did over time. Might their "Fantastic Four" be far more fondly regarded than it is today, and the innovations that they brought to the book be granted a greater measure of recognition than has proved?
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