Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules has to be one of the most bizarre series Marvel has produced in a while.

It's a miniseries written by James Sturm, an acclaimed indie comics creator best known for work such as The Golem's Mighty Swing.  Sturm normally draws his own work, but with a view to getting this book out on a sensible schedule (at Marvel?!), he's doing layouts, with Guy Davis providing the actual art.  Obviously, this is the sort of low-key character-driven drama which plays to Davis' strengths, and the combination works well.

The official explanation of the series is that, on learning that the Fantastic Four had been based on real people, Sturm began researching their definitive biography.  This series, allegedly, is the first in a projected trilogy documenting the lives of the real Fantastic Four, with the remaining two parts tentatively scheduled for 2007 and 2013.

This is, of course, nonsense.  What Sturm is producing here is a mock biography of fictional characters who might have inspired the Fantastic Four had they existed, backed up with scholarly mock-footnotes at the back of the book.  This begs the obvious question: for god's sake, why?

Commercially, it's hard enough to see what Marvel is doing with this book.  There's obvious prestige appeal in having Sturm do a series for them, but Marvel are hardly into money-losing vanity projects.  The market for a Fantastic Four miniseries about characters who aren't the Fantastic Four would seem to be restricted to a fairly small demographic, to put it mildly.  Perhaps Marvel think it'll do well in the bookstores, although it strikes me as a bit esoteric for that.

Creatively, this issue still leaves me none the wiser.  It's very readable, following the stories of four characters who are the obvious templates for the Fantastic Four.  Not a great deal really happens in this issue - it's largely about establishing the characters, with Johnny as a schoolboy, Sue as a housewife, Ben as a WW II vet and boxing coach, and Reed as a scientist.   Except he's a totally different sort of scientist, only interested in the bits with practical application.  While the real Reed specialises in Kirbytech, Sturm's version - having discovered unstable molecules - is diligently setting about stabilising them so that they'll make a nice fibre for industrial use.

Presumably this is going to be a story which follows the characters from being total civilians to being some sort of adventurers, and I'll hazard a vague guess that Sturm is trying to draw out some of the elements which connected the Fantastic Four to the real world of the 1960s by creating these curious intermediate characters.  It's a very strange approach indeed, and as I've never been all that interested in the Fantastic Four, I wasn't expecting to like it.  But it does draw you in, with the deliberately mundane events given more weight by the knowledge that we're being encouraged to compare this with the real Lee/Kirby characters.

Sturm is an excellent storyteller, even if it's not all that clear where he's going with this.  Much more interesting than I'd anticipated, even though I can't imagine there's a huge market out there for superhero arthouse.  Still, worth a try. 

Rating: A

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