The most hyped comic of the week is undoubtedly Fantastic Four #554, beginning the run of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch.  Marvel will surely be hoping that their success with Ultimates can be replicated here.

When this was announced, I had my doubts.  Now, on paper, Millar and Hitch certainly had a lot going for them.  It made sense to keep them together.  They were keen on big, sweeping ideas, which was exactly the sort of thing that the Fantastic Four ought to be about.  And the typical FF story would benefit from Hitch's widescreen art.

On top of that, Millar was making all the right noises in interviews.  As he points out, one of the big problems with the FF is a tendency to recycle the same old ideas.  Far too many creators have looked at the Lee/Kirby run and treated it as a pool of sacred concepts which constitute the FF mythos and which should be repeated endlessly.  Not enough creators have drawn the lesson that the FF are explorer heroes who should be constantly confronted with things that are new, mysterious and different.  This isn't to say that the FF can't have recurring villains; but strange new phenomena ought to be their stock-in-trade, and in practice that hasn't been the case.  Millar says he's shifting the emphasis towards new elements, and I thoroughly approve.

But the Fantastic Four is a shiny, old-school superhero book full of nice characters in a rather static nuclear family set-up.  It's not a cynical, dark book.  And Millar's output is littered with cynicism.  The tone of his writing didn't strike me as a good match.

To give Millar credit, though, this is perhaps the least cynical thing I've seen him write in ages.  There's nothing dark about any of these characters, and nothing that tries to be subversive.  For the most part, it's simply a straight take on the Fantastic Four, done in a slightly over the top way.  Johnny Storm seems to have been reinvented as a drooling idiot, as if Millar doesn't grasp the difference between "immature" and "moronic", but I suppose it's always possible that he's a Skrull.  (He does have a terribly small role in the story, which is a bit of a warning bell.)

It's a set-up issue, with no villains and no looming threat.  All that happens is that Millar and Hitch introduce the cast in a "joined in progress" action prologue, set some subplots in motion, and then bring in a couple of supporting characters.  Rather pleasingly, the cliffhanger isn't a moment of shocking violence, but simply the unveiling of a Big Idea.  And it's all basically fine, with its heart in the right place, and fabulous art.

With the cynicism removed, though, it's possible to see more clearly the biggest flaw in Millar's writing.  Let me take a couple of examples.  The idea that Reed has refurbished some old Doombots as servants is mildly amusing.  So if you have them hanging around as a background feature, and then Alyssa Moy shows up to ask Reed about them, that works (especially because it gives her and Reed something to talk about while Millar is re-establishing their relationship). 

But in the very first panel, Millar has She-Hulk saying "What's the story behind the Doombots, Sue?  They're hilarious!"  And that's a bad line of dialogue, partly because it draws attention to a joke that would be funnier if the readers were allowed to get it in their own time, and partly because it sounds as though the creators are congratulating themselves for being so clever.  (Let's be honest... "hilarious" is going a bit far.)

Example two.  Reed is about to visit a school.  A woman teacher is planning to flirt with him; a colleague reminds her that she's married.  She replies, "Bob and I agreed we get a free pass if we ever met a super hero.  Just like half the married couples in America."  First sentence?  Fine.  Old sitcom cliche about celebrities, transplanted to the superhero genre.  But fine.

Second sentence?  Awful.  It undermines the scene as a character moment by telling us that there's nothing remotely special about it.  It sets the proportion at a level which is absurdly, implausibly high, so it undercuts the suspension of disbelief.  But most importantly, it adds nothing to the gag, other than to hammer it home for the hard of thinking.

Now, let's be clear: I fully realise that spending two paragraphs dissecting a single line of dialogue is nitpicking to the extreme.  The point is that Millar does this all the time - he takes a basically decent idea, and gives it a weirdly inappropriate emphasis and prominence that makes it a little irritating.  Every time I hit one of these lines, I feel like I'm tripping over a kerb.  I could have chosen other examples from this issue - Reed talking about a one second margin of error as though it were nothing to worry about (even though he shows appropriate concern for everything else in the same scene); Alyssa Moy telling us that she works 19 hour days (while looking like the perkiest thing ever); pretty much the whole scene with Johnny talking about his mayfly attention span.  And in each case, if it was just dialled back a little bit, I suspect the underlying idea would work.

So... what we have here is an issue of set-up, with beautiful artwork, the right attitude, a pretty good grasp of three of the characters (and I'll reserve judgment on Johnny in case it's a deliberate story), and a promising central idea.  On the down side, the story takes a little long to get started, there's not much in the way of drama yet, and it's got more than a few kerbstones.

But it's a happy, shiny comic, and it's nice to see Millar break out of that cynical, cooler-than-thou straitjacket. Bright colours suit him.

Rating: B+

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