What I Bought 10/10/2024

The local comic shop didn't get any of its Marvel stuff last week - hence no Deadpool review - and this week's stuff didn't arrive until yesterday. But they did arrive, so let's make the best of it. In other news, the work truck I used Wednesday for what should have been a relatively brief excursion broke down, leaving me stranded in a podunk town near a very busy railroad crossing for 3.5 hours. Did my brain endlessly replay the opening song from In the Heat of the Night? You better believe it, especially the, 'I've got troubleeeeeees, wall to wall,' part.

Fantastic Four #26, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) -  Dollars to donuts Reed's trying to pull Johnny under.

Most of the cast is in New York, trick or treating. Johnny stayed home to wait for trick or treaters that ever arrived, and Reed stayed home to keep working on a magic detector. And it's detected something in the basement! Johnny convinces Reed not to wait for Sue to return (when she could just make the floor invisible to see what's down there), and they get to excavating.

And unearth a portal which spews forth ghosts of all sorts of extinct animals, which Reed theorizes are the spirits of ever animal that ever died there. Excited as he is at observing prehistoric beetles, the portal keeps spewing out ghosts, unless there's something constantly entering the portal from the other side. Fortunately, Johnny saw an article about a group of occultists planning to use a skull which constantly vomits blood to summon Mongaroth, The Charnel Destroyer of Flesh. So Reed and Johnny travel to the Paris catacombs and steal the magic, blood-vomiting skull (which also keeps saying "bleh", without halting the torrent of blood vomit.)

I had never considered how Johnny would absolutely be able to egg Reed on into bad ideas in the name of SCIENCE! Sue's aggravation with the whole thing is hilarious, as is Reed objecting to her description of their schemes as "zany." The skull's little top hat is a great touch. Ben and Alicia's dog is dressed as Jeff the Land Shark for Halloween, while Franklin's dressed as Spider-Man, which Johnny doesn't comment on, but you know he's annoyed.

Anyway, I loved this issue. It cracked me up, really great. 10 out of 10, no notes.

What I Bought 1/29/2024 - Part 1

There was a little comic convention in the next town over last weekend, so Alex brought along his nephew and we met up there. Alex bought a couple of detective novels on a whim (I think the author really pitched them hard), and his nephew found a big Godzilla figure. I didn't expect to find anything, but the guy that put the convention on had issues 23-45 of Justice League International for $15, which seemed like too good a deal to ignore.

Fantastic Four #15, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Sure, Reed, expose a brain in a jar to gamma radiation, what's the worst that could happen?

Picking up where issue 14 left off, the FF can't figure out why the Baxter Building didn't appear as planned. Well, the app they tried to destroy the previous issue is already sentient, and exists (on the Internet somewhere, I assume.) So it (somehow) shunted the building and its inhabitants into a pocket dimension. It will bring them back, as long as Richards stays out of the way. Then it somehow engineers a bunch of other problems to keep them busy while it also engineers a way to get people to build a big transmitter so it can search for other beings like itself in space.

Reed figures out a way to bring it into the open so to speak, and makes an offer to work together. But the techbro that started the app figured out how to cut it off from over a quarter of the users that make up its mind, so it falls to pieces. It got to me, the all-black panels and Metamind's rapidly degrading speech patterns as it dies. Maybe I'm just feeling maudlin these days. I felt sad about that lunar lander Japan sent up landing upside-down and slowly running out of power without really getting to do anything.

Well, the upshot is, however Metamind sent the Baxter Building to another dimension, it only stays there as long as Metamind says so. So everyone comes back, just a little later than planned, there's a happy reunion with the kids. Reed even sends Doom a photo so he knows his goddaughter made it back OK. Something about doing the kind thing. As a teaser, Metamind did manage several transmissions Reed can't decipher, sent to an empty portion of space. Given this issue is called "China Brain Chapter One," I suspect we're going to find out what's out there at some point.

Fingers crossed it's not a Dominion. If I never see that word in a comic again, it'll suit me fine.

Rogues #1, by El Torres (writer) and Pablo M. Collar (artist), Monkey Typers (letterers) - Just jumping across an empty space during a thunderstorm, as one does.

Weasel (the lady) and Bram (the big dude) got hired to beat up a scarlet-ish witch on behalf of her angry apprentice. Unfortunately, they didn't finish the beating before they were cursed. Now their souls are scattered through their timelines and if they don't want them devoured by the witchity order's gods, they have to jump in a well and hop through their lives to recover them.

Which is one way to introduce the main characters. Do quick jaunts through their pasts, where they grew up, some of their other friends, how they met, things like that. Hint at things to possibly revisit later. We know that one of Bram's friends later became a draugr and they fought to the death, and that they were cursed to be pursued by chickens.

So most of the times they visit are treated as jokes. The chickens, them finding out one job went wrong because their future selves killed the rest of the crew in a misunderstanding about betrayal. Weasel beating up a wizard with a mustache and familiar cloak because she just hates that guy so much. They aren't laugh out loud funny, I think because we lack context, so it's sort of random, and that can only go so far.

Collar's art is selectively busy. When the characters are supposed to look serious, usually seriously pissed, the amount of hatching and scratchy lines increase. When it's a comedic reaction, he goes simpler. It works for the book's generally irreverent tone, so that's good.

I'm not sure if we're meant to take it that the Amaranth Sorceress got herself killed in her attempt to chase Weasel and Bram, or that she found her avenue to take further revenge. Could go either way.

What I Bought 12/8/2023

So, because I met Alex to help with one of his gigs (and keep him company while he got his new stomach tat shaded), I had time to swing by the comic place in the next town over. Which had not only the one book from last week, but the remaining book from last month I hadn't found yet. Huzzah!

Fantastic Four #14, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Reed Richards is so awful, even the Sinister Six want in on kicking his ass.

The FF have returned to New York, to await the return of their home and their kids. But someone's building a receiver dish (out of wood?) in the middle of the lot. Worse, none of the people doing it know why. They're just doing things a phone app game tells them to in return for rewards. Not like, cash, rewards in the game.

This includes the Lady Sinister Six, Sinister Syndicate, whatever that group from Nick Spencer's run called themselves. Who the FF beat in 2 pages? Oh come on, I've seen the FF struggle with teams led by the frickin' Wizard for multiple issues.

Anyway, this is all the work of some tech billionaire dipshit who is using the app as some form of Asimov's psychohistory, getting people to do little things to create a future he wants. Little things, like giving a guy an extra day's vacation, which results in a supply chain shortage somewhere else. Except, billionaire guy doesn't know anything about any construction at the site of the FF's home. Someone else is using his app for their own ends. I suspect the app itself. It's one step towards the singularity, or the Dominion, or whatever goofy-ass thing is supposed to be waiting in the future according to the X-books.

Reed takes the plea to help as a chance to delete the app and all the data, then Johnny torches the servers. Problem solved! Except for the part where Reed mentions he might try making a 'simpler' instance. Just to predict when another app like this might appear. And to predict when he needs to start building another Negative Zone prison, probably. For the second time this week I ask, are we just forgetting Civil War happened now? I'm pretty OK with that, but less so when it lets Richards off the hook.

Oh, and their home didn't appear like it was supposed to. Guess somebody forgot to carry the one.

Space Outlaws #2, by Marco Fontanili - Guys with mustaches, oversized guns, a frightened horse. It's either a western or a '70s film you shouldn't let children watch. Which describes a lot of Westerns, now that I think about it.

F-24K spends most of the issue being chased by Texas Rangers, as it's spent it's limited time on Earth killing, robbing, and generally having a grand old time. One of the rangers manages to shoot it, and F-24K wakes up tied to a table, about to be chopped up and, possibly eaten?

The alien just tears its way out of the body its wearing and kills the lot of them with a lot of severing of limbs and heads and bisecting bodies and whatnot. When there's only one guy left, he prays for deliverance. Instead he gets some super-science bomb chucked into the cabin by the kill-bot chasing F-24K. It kills the man but not the alien, so next issue will be the big showdown.

Yeah, not a lot of plot. Fontanili switches from the magenta he used as his primary color in the first issue to more of a luminous, golden-yellow. It seems to mirror the sky with the setting sun behind the chase on pages 2 and 3. After that, the usage varies. Sometimes Fontanili still uses it for backdrops. Other times he colors in the entire character (except the white of their eyes) and leaves the background in a greyish-blue or black. Sometimes everything is in the golden-yellow. I can't peg a pattern to it. The flashback to F-24K's activities since hitting earth is all in heavy blacks and greys. Like the acts already lost their luster and it's on to the next hit of excitement.

A Winter That Never Ends

Deep in the woods of Russia, a mother and daughter try to make it through the winter. The winter is an unrelenting world of grey, the only color in the world the few red leaves trying to hang onto the trees. 

Otherwise, color exists only in Tatiana's dreams, which (via colorist Lorenzo Palombo) are tinged pink like bloodstained snow. Her husband was drafted for the Soviet invasion of Finland, and his unknown fate hovers over everything. Her daughter, Yari, asks for stories or fables, but they always come back around to when her father will return. If the Gnome King, can find anyone, could he find her father for her? There's a fable repeated within the story, about a father who goes to hunt a great monster, and warns his family they must stake him through the heart with a birch limb if he returns more than 10 days later. Yari insists that if it's not real, it can't be scary, but if it was real, Father would protect them. If he was there.

Food is scarce, news scarcer still. The only neighbor Rosi introduces in the story (making mother and daughter feel truly isolated) claims something attacked and massacred his goats. Yari found wolves torn apart in the woods. Yari thinks she saw something outside the window at night. All of this takes a toll on Tatiana, trying to reassure her daughter and hold herself together alone. She grows more short-tempered and prone to alcohol-fueled rage as the isolation drags on. This culminates in a scene where Yari has gone far afield exploring and doesn't make it home after dark. Tatiana sits at the table, muttering over her powerlessness and dwindling supply of vodka. She cries over what she assumes will be Yari's fate, until the girl returns.

It's never said, but I assume the mark over Yari's eye was from some prior outburst, either after the husband left, or one he simply wasn't able to prevent. In any scenes in the past where we see Yari and her father together, Ivan Fiorelli always draws Yari's back to us. We also never see all three of them together, which seems to imply neither Tatiana's happiest memories with her husband, or Yari with her father, involve the other person.

Rosi cuts away to check in on the husband's situation periodically. The details are as one would suspect. Insufficient supplies, insufficient leadership, insufficient forces. Point is, it's bad. You can tell where the story's going from a long way off, if the fable Yari wants to hear isn't enough of a tipoff. (Notably, the husband makes reference to promises he made his daughter, but never mentions his wife.)

What I Bought 7/15/2023 - Part 1

My Friday got off to a great start with a notice from my bank they put a freeze on my debit card because of some strange charges. At least they caught it, but no debit card until they get the new one to me. Most annoying.

In the other annoying developments, the guy that runs the local store apparently didn't realize the credit card the distributor had on file for him expired two weeks ago until this week, so I had to wait until I met up with Alex in the next town over on Saturday to grab any books. Plus side, that store had at least one book the local guy wouldn't. Plus, Alex was playing the country club gig, which meant plenty of good food for him and me.

Who says I can't look on the bright side? Besides me, obviously.

Fantastic Four #9, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - This is all a misunderstanding! The misunderstanding is everyone should be trying to kill Reed.

Alicia narrates as she, Sue and Johnny try to hold off Ben and Reed, under the cntrol of Xargorr, who actually is one of those early Marvel sci-fi monsters. The rest of her people left Earth, but Xargorr stayed behind and set herself up like a queen, with an army of people who don't remember anything else. Man, Xavier and those other X-telepaths could take lessons from this lady, since she can remove any knowledge of Johnny or Sue from Reed and Ben as friends or family, but still know Johnny won't burn them.

So Alicia gets the idea to use her creative talents to help Sue and Johnny come up with a combo attack the other two won't expect. Sue gives her a small force field projection to mold as a model, while Sue copies it on a large scale. North sets it up with a page of nothing but dark panels and voice balloons, then lets Fiorelli and Arbutov go big with the double-page splash.

Also, Fiorelli draws a very good homicidally deranged Reed Richards. Little bit of spittle in the corner of his mouth and crazy eyes. The works.

Even with force-field calamari kaiju, things are looking bad, so Sue plays the old gambit of goading the villain into of trying to use their power one more time, and sends it back at her. The previous issue had established Sue force fields can block the telepathic waves. North's pretty good at that aspect of writing, which is something I appreciate.

Unstoppable Doom Patrol #4, by Dennis Culver (writer), David Lafuente (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Pat Brosseau (letterer) - Is her head supposed to be a Rorschach test or something?

Breather issue, guest artist. Did Burnham need a skip month to stay on schedule? Is that why this thing went from 6 issues to 7?

Anyway, the doctor's power lets her commune with 5th-dimensional entities who see beyond space and time and help people visualize what's in their mind. So she talks with everyone on the team individually about what they're feeling, while Lafuente draws parts of their past or their present in the background. And each session ends with some bit of profound realization by either the character or the doc, though of course the characters aren't always receptive. Still, it feels trite how they all conclude like that, when you would expect them all to be at different stages. Some hear but don't accept, some won't even hear it. Some won't interact.

I guess that's the new Chief's spot, as she's apparently lying about how all the others in their system are fine with her being out all the time. Can't the others stage a rebellion and force themselves to the forefront, so to speak? I'm sure that won't happen at an inconvenient time!

Lafuente's a good choice for artist, though. His style's much looser, more animated than Burnham's. Better suited to an issue focused on what people perceive inside their minds, which won't match reality. So Rita's mind makes Flex Mentallo out to be even buffer than he actually is, really cartoonish, while her version of herself swoons against him, hair obscuring one eye in a classic actress look. Beast Girl thinks of the Chief as a holy figure, the sun encircling her head as she holds up a uniform.

The real question is whether any of what's discussed here will prove important later on. Will Robotman be willing to trust the others and not do everything himself? Will Rita self-sabotage her happiness somehow? Will Negative Man realize he's not alone, or realize he doesn't have things figured out as neatly as he thinks? Three issues left to find out!

What I Bought 6/10/2023

I had to run to the next town up on Saturday, and figured I'd try the comic store there, since it's more likely to have books from smaller publishers. Lo and behold, they had both books I wanted from last week. It also looked like they were going to go back to stocking DC, after they dropped it when it switched distributors (something about the reduced discounts not making it worth the cost.)

Fantastic Four #8, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Arbutov (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - For the record, that is not Spragg, the Living Hill in the background. Sorry if you were getting your hopes up.

Sue and Alicia head to town for a supply run, but notice something odd about the town. It seems as though it should have a lot more people, but no one else seems to notice. A store is open one minute, closed a half-hour later, and everyone acts as though it's always been closed. Finding this curious, the ladies return home to consult with the others and find only Johnny. Who has no idea who "Reed" or "Ben" are.

North has a bit of fun with the mental contortions the affected people go through to explain why they're in a photograph with people they don't know, or in Johnny's case, how they're the Fantastic Four when it's just he and Sue. I guess with A.I. art and photoshop and what not, it's pretty easy to explain being in photos with people you've never met. And now that I think about it, the mental contortions thing reminds me of my grandmother's explanations for why, if her mother was still living with her, (when she'd been dead over 40 years) she wasn't anywhere in the house.

(It led to one conversation where she was convinced her mother was wandering around somewhere, and when I pointed out she was dead and buried, my grandmother replied, "What's she doing up walking around then?")

Anyway, there's some sort of wood-creature that wants adoring subjects behind it, and now they've got half the FF on their side, so that'll be fun. More disturbing than that, or even the first few pages of the comic, where Johnny adds a backwards baseball cap and tank top to his terrible mustache look, is North has Sue call Alicia, "Allie", which is just weird to me. I've never seen any writer give her that nickname and it honestly threw me. Like, "really, we're doing that?" Maybe I've just never perceived Sue as a "nickname" person.

Sudden Death #1, by Alexander Banks-Jongman (writer), Robert Ahmad (artist), DC Hopkins (letterer) - Any crash you can walk away from.

Hank Kelly's a man focused on trying to regain custody of his daughter. His periodic suicidal thoughts are not helping. For the first dozen pages, Banks and Ahmad stick almost completely to 9-panel grids. Little squares of Hank or some other person's face. It lets you see the struggle, exhaustion and desperation in him, but also how isolated he is. The page at his therapist's office, the two share no panels. It's always him talking, then a panel of her talking. They might as well be in separate worlds.

On his way to the hearing, Hank is run over by a truck. For most of the comic, Ahamd (I assumed, there's no colorist listed) sticks to blue/white/black colors. It could be considered soothing, but given Hank's hangdog expression most of the time, it's more melancholy. The four panels immediately after he's hit are all in golden-orange. You'd think that would make them happier, but half of them show the dissolution of his marriage, so maybe it's just that these are strong memories that burn through the depression. 

Hank wakes up in a hospital bed five hours later, completely fine. There's no explanation he or the doctors can provide, but word's gotten out and there's already a crowd outside the hospital cheering for him. Meanwhile, somewhere else, a woman comes home, and as she relates her day to her husband, his body basically bursts apart.

That's where it ends, the implication that Hank's injuries were somehow shunted to this other poor guy. Why, how? Unrevealed at present. I can't imagine things will end well. Hank seems excited at the prospect of people cheering and adoring him, but he also doesn't seem like someone who handles pressure or people wanting to be close to him very well. That's not a personality well-suited for celebrity, even before someone finds out other people are dying because of whatever this is. We'll have to see when or if the next issue arrives.

What I Bought 4/12/2023

The temperature is climbing, but I refuse to turn on my AC! For now. Hold off on letting my electric bill take a hatchet to my wallet as long as possible. After all, it's the job of comic books to deplete my finances.

Fantastic Four #6, Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Aburtov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Oh crap, it's the Civil War schism all over again. At least Sue got the Fantasticar in the divorce this time.

The mirror dimension algae is on the loose. The FF purify a lake in under 3 minutes, but given the extent of spread already, that's not good enough. Johnny, remembering Reed mentioned the algae just needs light and air to make food, gets the idea of having Sue make the Sun invisible until the algae starves to death. But only for 16 hours a day for three consecutive days, and only over a few states.

So Johnny keeps her company in the upper atmosphere while she does that, and Reed, Ben and Alicia try to keep people from freaking out, and beat up Dr. Octopus. They fail (at keeping people calm, not beating Doc Ock, they haven't fallen that far), but the mobs wait until Day 3 to combine torches with pitchforks, so it doesn't get too out of hand. Then Maria Hill shows up.

I trust that sentence speaks for itself.

This seems like an attempt to give Sue more focus, and at least as far as her interactions with Johnny, it sort of works. North lets Sue be less of a "mom" to Johnny, and more like close friends. She can needle him about stuff, but not in an exasperated "why won't you grow up?" way. When he pauses in reading Jane Eyre to her and she comments her audiobook narrator has mysteriously stopped.

Beyond that, North's Sue is empathetic and observant, in that she recognizes that Reed stresses himself with how often they've beaten the odds saving the world, and how close some of those successes have been. And so she actually relishes this year away from that - recent adventures notwithstanding - because it lets them all decompress. But that's really more a matter of luck, isn't it? If the world were in danger, from say, mirror dimension algae, they would be back into the world saving business, It's just happened to take this long for such a situation to arise.

North's mostly moved away from the approach he had in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and the first issue of this book of ending pages on some sort of joke or gag, but not entirely. I don't think the artists' styles really suit that approach. Neither Fiorelli or Coello's work leans towards humor. The body language and expressions don't exaggerate enough to really sell the moments. North might need to move away from that sort of thing even further.

Moon Knight #22, Jed MacKay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Someone got into the Pym Particles again.

Marc's old enemy Midnight Man is on the loose, committing robberies, but Marc shows little interest in pursuing him. So Tigra decides to handle it herself. Talks to Moonie's old cop buddy Flint, investigates the victims for connections, randomly talks with Hawkeye, and figures out the next target. Catches the bad guy, who is someone she knows, and we know. Who needs money, because he made a big show of not caring when Zodiac stole all his cash 15 some-odd issues ago.

There's a big argument and, well, of note here is MacKay brings up the fact that Tigra's son is the product of her sleeping with a Skrull who thought they were Hank Pym, and who Tigra thought was Pym, but was not, in fact, Hank Pym.

Which I don't remember anyone ever addressing beyond (I think) Christos Gage in Avengers Academy having Tigra worried her son would manifest Skrull traits. I'm not sure Tigra really needs her son being the product of sexual assault added to her backstory, on top of the crap Bendis did, on top of the crap Englehart did with having her want to jump everything with a dick (because cats are apparently always horny in Steve Englehart's world), on top of when Byrne had her go feral and then Pym shrunk her down to pet cat size, and. . .goddamn Tigra's gotten a shit hand from writers.

Over the course of the issue, MacKay's weaving Tigra's investigation in with her life as a single mother who apparently has no paying job. She describes herself as living on a partial Avengers pension, as using her old Avengers login to steal Stark's wi-fi so she can upload photos of her son for her parents. She's not going to get her security deposit back, because her and William's claws have done a number on the floors (and Cappuccio makes sure when we see the floors in the next panel, there are lots of scratches. He also shows William playing with his mom's hair while she's sitting and thinking, like when you see lion kittens chewing on the parents' ears or whatever.)

And so far as William knows, Hank Pym is his dad. He doesn't know about the Skrull or anything like that and she intends to keep it that way. So that's a thing she has to carry, because she doesn't want the circumstances of his birth to burden him. It's a rough emotional situation for her. Cappuccio has her body language all over the place. She's in Marc's face, teeth bared, but sometimes she's crying. Or she's turned away and she shifts from sad to furious in the span of one panel. Arms spread wide or with a finger jabbed aggressively at Marc, or pulled in close, practically hugging herself. She's letting a lot of stuff out all at once, I'm guessing because she's got no one else to tell if she's telling friggin' Moon Knight. That's maybe one step up from discussing emotional trauma with Frank Castle.

I mean, who are Tigra's friends in the superhero community? Mockingbird? Times like this, I wish writers hadn't cast aside the friendship Tigra started to develop with Jessica Drew in Spider-Woman so Carol Danvers could be Spider-Woman's Only Lady Friend Who's a Superhero.

What I Bought 3/8/2023 - Part 2

The regional library had their annual used book sale last weekend. I'd been meaning to go for years, but something always came up. Picked up 8 books, two CDs and a movie for 10 bucks, so expect resumption of book reviews in the near future.

Sgt Rock vs. the Army of the Dead #6, by Bruce Campbell (writer), Eduardo Risso (artist), Kristian Rossi (colorist), Rob Leigh (letterer) - Credit where credit's due: the interior of the book delivers what the cover promises.

This issue is basically Rock fighting Hitler (who is all hopped up on those revitalization drugs) in the bunker while Easy Co. calls in another saturation bombing. It's a seesaw battle with Hitler using weapons and misdirection, but Rock basically just powering through all of it. Kind of like a pro wrestling match that way. Hitler tries a bayonet, a pistol, a syringe full of those drugs, hitting Rock with a locker, gassing him.

Risso and Rossi illustrate the fight to good effect. Bent noses or bones protruding from broken wrists. They emphasize the difference in the characters' eyes. Rock with larger white ovals and dark pupils, while Hitler gets smaller, almost bird-like yellow eyes with pupils like dots. I like that in the panel I picked, Rossi even shows the outline of Hitler's messed-up mustache by where the blood is and isn't. It's a nice bit of detail.

Rock survives the bombing, but the Army would like him to deal with similar problems now, and that's pretty much the end of the comic. Feels a bit like Campbell's referencing that bit from the '90s Suicide Squad book that said Rock handled missions to that island with dinosaurs and whatnot. Could just be a coincidence. I'm still curious why Campbell started with the internal narration boxes in the last two issues, after not using them in the first half of the mini-series. They did have the effect of making Rock feel more familiar.

Rock keeps up a sort of steady string of one-liners during the fight, which I'm less into. If the fight is meant to be a grim, difficult struggle, the dialogue cuts against that. But it's a story about fist-fighting a Hitler doped up on drugs to bring the dead back to life, so that's probably not the effect Campbell's going for anyway.

Fantastic Four #5, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - That's kind of trippy. Good work.

Nicholas Scratch and the Salem Seven show up to. . .mildly annoy the Four by spinning them around? Well, it turns out they've somehow reversed the "handedness" of the team's molecules, making them incompatible with life in their own universe. Their bodies could try to break down food, but the enzymes can't bond properly to do so. Slow death by starvation.

They get into the Dark Dimension and Reed does something to push his powers to the point where he can reverse the process. Spin everyone around in four dimensions so they're molecules are aligned properly. Something like that. They go home, Reed has Johnny burn some gunk off Ben because he fell in a pool of water and they don't want to carry any Dark Dimension bacteria over here, but completely ignores the puddle of water from where Ben landed. *sad trombone*

Of course, one of the locals of the Dark Dimension tried to chase them and its arm got lopped off when the portal closed. Sue just picked it up with a force bubble and tossed it in a dumpster. What if there are invasive bacteria in it? I guess they probably aren't photosynthetic if they live inside a creature, so they'll have the same "can't eat" problem the FF were going to. But it seems like something to be more careful with than that.

North seems to really like writing Reed Richards. Maybe something about the opportunity for creative solutions that comes with writing a genius. But at least in this issue, it feels like it reduces the rest of the team to Reed's supporting cast, which I'm not sure is the way to go. Certainly at some point Sue needs to get some spotlight,

Fiorelli kept the look of the book reasonably close to Coello's, although I see more 2000s Ron Garney is his work than I did in Coello's. Especially in some of the hatching and shading. Anyway, I assume Fiorelli got across what North was looking for with the thing Reed did with his body to do the rotating. 

He does draw Ben Grimm with closer to a normal human's proportions, however. Seeing the Thing with a body that tapers towards the waist is kinda weird. Plus he gave him a neck. The Thing is not supposed to have a neck! It was in the style guide and everything!