Fantastic Four is a title I end up reading rarely when a writer I like gets the job. I don’t have a particular attachment to any of the characters, but as Marvel’s first title it gets some of the best writers. The book works best when it’s a science/exploration/family drama and less so when it focuses on the super heroing. To that end, Jonathan Hickman is the perfect writer for this title. Anyone who has read his Image work (Red Mass for Mars, Transhuman, Pax Romana, Nightly News…GET THEM NOW!) knows Hickman is a talented scifi writer with big ideas. Dale Eaglesham has been one of my favorite pencilers for years, but his work in this first arc of Hickman’s run is spotty and his decision to draw Reed as buff is just kind of baffling. Hickman introduces The Council of Reeds, composed of Reed Richards from alternate universes who’s goal is to “Solve Everything”, gets the obligatory Galactus appearance out of the way, and focuses on the FF children-Val and Franklin-with the last two issues of the collection. Hickman lays groundwork for what I hope will be a long run on the title. Hopefully Eaglesham will settle into his usual form as he’s on the book longer. For now, a good start, but not as spectacular as I’ve come to expect from the talent involved.
7.5/10

Planetary combined writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday on a project that exhibited both their amazing ability to do mind popping science fiction and their unfortunate tendency to become extraordinarily distracted. Despite the latter, to which we’ll return, Planetary is a landmark series and now that it’s (FINALLY) done, I went back and read it from the beginning recently.

Planetary operates from the concept that the world is a strange place and it needs to be kept that way. The Planetary Foundation works to make that a consistent reality under the leadership of the enigmatic and pigmentally-challenged Elijah Snow. The series works best as a series of short stories that work together to build this strange world. For example one story focuses on a disaster that occurs when a private foundation creates a such a completely believable fictional reality that it becomes possible to send a ship full of fictionauts into that reality and extract a character. Planetary has tons of mindbending, huge science fiction concepts like this that are tremendous amounts of fun to read. John Cassaday is my favorite artist in comics and Planetary showcases his ability to visualize difficult concepts in such detail that you can spend 20 minutes looking at one of his pages drinking in all the nuance.

Most of, if not all, of Planetary’s problem stem from the fact that this is a 27 issue series. Most comics come out monthly so, in theory, Planetary should have taken a hair under two years to complete. It took ten. That’s ten years. Sometimes several years would pass inbetween issues, which is not an unheard of problem for Warren Ellis books. His amazing Fell at Image had a great first trade come out that collected the first eight issues and since then one issue has come out. That was April 2008. One issue in two years. This sort of delay can lead to some narrative lapses that become apparent even when reading the whole series in one sitting. Lord alone knows how anyone could be expected to follow Planetary’s larger, overarching plotlines. Those plots are all interesting, don’t get me wrong. They center around the idea that children born on January 1, 1900-so called “century children”- were imbued with immortality, special gifts, and a purpose. Planetary is really the story of Elijah Snow figuring out what his purpose is as the second century of his life begins. That story gets pretty trampled upon and buried during the middle of Planetary’s run. I don’t know if it was Ellis’ intention to originally have this be a much longer series, but there’s a whole lot of stuff going on and not a lot of resolution happening until the final arc of the series. That resolution is satisfying, the imagination of the book is always stunning, and Cassady’s art is flawless throughout, but when you read Planetary you can’t help but wonder what it could have been if it had just been a little bit more.
8.0/10

War of Kings (Hardcover ed.)
by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, Marvel Comics

War of Kings is the latest in Abnett & Lanning’s (helpfully referred hereafter by their fan moniker DnA) cosmic saga that has rewritten a corner of the Marvel universe that gets little to no attention from anyone but hardcore comic fans. Starting with Annihilation and Annhilation: Conquest and branching off into their ongoing Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy books, DnA have take characters with potential but no history and made their story the best and most consistent of the comics Marvel has published in the last five years.

War of Kings is the story of the Kree/Shi’ar War and the personal battle between their two emperors, Black Bolt of the Inhumans and Vulcan (brother to Cyclops and Havok of the X-Men). If that sentence just went totally over your head, then you’re not ready to read War of Kings. Go get Annihilation and start at the beginning of this epic. That point is really the biggest complaint about WoK. The story and writing are excellent as always, but where the Annihilation books felt like you could just jump in and learn about these characters as they go, WoK (probably by the very fact that it uses characters with a lot more continuity baggage) is a chapter in the saga and one that doesn’t stand as well on it’s own. The art is also inconsistent and unspectacular, proving distracting from the story at times.

This isn’t to say the book isn’t worth checking out. Marvel does a great job with their hardcovers and this one includes not only the WoK issues but the Darkhawk miniseries that ran alongside it and a few other one-shots. The bar that DnA aim for at this stage is really the one they set for themselves and by that standard WoK falls a bit short, but is still necessary reading for fans of Marvel’s cosmic characters.

7.75/10