Following last year's Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes series, Joe Casey returns to the early Silver Age with Fantastic Four: First Family (as it's officially called - once again, Marvel have chosen to confuse matters by putting a different title on the cover).

The basic idea of Earth's Mightiest Heroes was to take the early issues of Avengers and impose a bit of structure on them, fleshing out the characters and putting in all the storyline material which, with the benefit of hindsight, seems to be missing from the originals.  It was an unexpectedly good comic, which managed to weave its way in and out of the haphazard early stories and actually build a storyline around them.  Of course, the style is a million miles away from the original stories, and trying to read the stories side by side would be a terrible mistake - but that's not really the point.

Fantastic Four: First Family, from the look of it, seems to be more of a character-driven series dealing with the immediate aftermath of the FF's origin story.  The original stories rather skip over this bit, so it's fair game for revisiting.  Mercifully, we're spared yet another retread of the trip to space, and Casey picks up the story with the group recuperating in American military custody - whether they like it or not.

As you'd expect, the first issue is basically four characters in shock, and Ben Grimm being particularly miserable.  Casey brings in an army general to serve as our point of view for the opening scenes, because god knows none of the team are up to the job yet.  This could easily come across as unbearably glum, but most of the team are back on track to their normal personalities by the second half of the issue, so we're clearly not going to be dwelling on this for too long.

The real strength of the book is Chris Weston's art, which manages the seemingly impossible task of making the team's powers seem fresh again.  Reed Richards' powers ought to be a gift to artists, but in practice most of them seem to take a house style approach, using the same basic selection of techniques that have been in circulation for decades.  Weston goes back to first principles and does it his own way, making Reed's extended limbs look... well, fleshy.  And they almost never look fleshy.  Usually they're drawn like rubber.  There's something subtly wrong about doing it this way, which is hugely effective in making the visual fresh again.

Nothing about this book is fundamentally surprising - it's familiar characters behaving in much the way you'd expect at this stage in their career.  But that's not really the point.  It's done extremely well, and it makes the characters feel fresh by adopting its own style rather than simply using the established routines which creators have been recycling since the Lee/Kirby days (oh look, Johnny's played a practical joke on Ben and they're going to fight through the Baxter Building... again).  These things have the advantage of cosy familiarity, but cosy familiarity is no substitute for the mad ideas which were the true virtue of early Fantastic Four comics.  If anything, they miss the point and reduce the comic to an extended nostalgia trip.  And what's the point of that, when you could just buy the original Lee/Kirby stories and read those?

This doesn't read like a Lee/Kirby comic in the slightest, so much as an affectionate cover version in the creators' own style.  And that's precisely why it works. 

Rating: A

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