Alex Sarll's Reviews > Fantastic Four: Life Story

The Life Story series has a gimmick so obvious that, in most contexts other than corporate superhero comics, it would just be the default: characters are introduced when they were introduced, and then age normally over the subsequent decades, instead of staying pretty much the same age forever in a perpetual second act. Now, with the first recipient of the treatment, Spider-Man, that was a perfect fit; regret has always been key to the character, and even coming of age to a degree - he's one of the few core Marvel characters who has appreciably aged within the core continuity. But for the FF, you're taking characters who are all about possibility, exploration, every problem ultimately having a solution - and then shackling them to the inevitability of loss, the gradual closing off of options. And given the decades over which the story is set, that's paralleled with something similar happening to the world, the optimism of the sixties gradually corroding down the years. True, things run slightly differently here; the nineties' burst of renewed optimism bears concrete fruit, Wakanda curing AIDS while Stark strangles the threat of global warming in its infancy ("Awkward analogy, but cool!"). But that's set against a backdrop where Reed knows for decades in advance that Galactus is coming, yet is initially dismissed as a crank or simply a downer, neglecting his family to desperately prepare while the world ignores him. Mark Russell has always been good at finding resonant metaphors for our ills in the most unlikely places, but the black comedy with which the unpalatable truths were seasoned in Billionaire Island or his Hanna-Barbera books is in short supply here; mainly the outlook is just black, for all that he strives to find a tragic grandeur and even hope on the other side of that. Still, even if it's not a fun read, or an approach I'd want to see brought to these characters too often, it's impressive. Sadly the same cannot be said of the art, where more era-appropriate looks for each issue might have worked better than a single artist with a fairly fixed style, even if said artist weren't sometimes prone to outright wonky anatomy.