ComicFest '07

Thanks to a spectacular back issue sale at Bargain Comics ($.70 for most recent back issues!) I was able to stock up on some titles I had been meaning to read. Here is a breakdown of some of the books I read this past weekend:

Ms. Marvel #1-9
This is a title I had initially picked up on issue #20 thanks to some intriguing online reviews. Since I started reading the series after the Civil War fallout I was a bit out of touch with the current story, so I snagged the first 12 issues of the series and read through to #9 last night. Now that I have a better perspective on this title I can say that really like the story thus far. Ms. Marvel had always seemed a side character to me but Brian Reed has fleshed her out and given Carol Danvers a very unique personality.

The basic gist of the story is Ms. Marvel remembers the events of the House of M and her former status as the greatest superhero in the world. She was a celebrity, much like the Fantastic Four, and was codenamed Captain Marvel. However, after the House of M ended she returned to her current status in the Marvel universe. She is still a superhero, but she is not a household name and she feels that she should be doing much greater things with her life, especially after having the knowledge of what she was in the alternate reality. She decides she must be come "the best of the best", and this is the tag line for the first story arc. The first few issues deal with her trying to prove how great a superhero she can be, while juggling public appearances and a new villain that followed her from the House of M universe to ours.

There are many fun aspects of this series, the first being the guest appearances of Marvel characters I haven't seen in quite a while along with team-ups with bigger Marvel Heroes that are a bit less mainstream. So far we've seen Ms. Marvel interact with Doctor Strange, Arachne (Spider-Woman), Jessica Drew out of costume, Wonder Man, Shroud and Prowler. The first major villains she encounters before the Civil War tie-in is a sorcerer named Warren Traveler and the powerful alien Cru. Both were great villains and are outside the standard cadre of bad guys we've been seeing the past few years. I have a feeling both Cru and Traveler will have recurring roles in this book.

Overall I like this series, it's a fresh look at what could have been a standard spandex superhero title and is a lot of fun to read. You can tell Reed is a fan of the character and the Marvel universe, he's like a kid in a candy store with these stories. The art is solid with some extremely standout pieces (see the car chase scene in #7). If you're tired of the depressing turn in Amazing Spider-Man, Hulk's non-stop smashing or just looking for something new, I recommend picking up this title.

Fantastic Four: The End #1-6
Billed as the "last Fantastic Four story ever!", this out of continuity title by Alan Davis takes place hundreds of years in the future. All of "The End" titles are supposed to tell the last great adventure of our Marvel heroes. We've also had X-Men: The End, X-Men - Phoenix: The End and so on. FF: The End works a bit better than the other titles simply because the Fantastic Four has always been a sci-fi book and tossing them into the distant future seems much more natural than it does for the X-Men.

This mini-series opens with yet another brutal battle between the FF and Dr. Doom. However, things take a tragic turn when the children Franklin and Valeria Reed join the battle and subsequently die along with Dr. Doom during a freak reaction of their powers and Doom's energy fields. We then flash forward a couple hundred years to find the Fantastic Four have gone their separate ways. The life of all our favorite superheroes has been lengthened dramatically by the Methuselah Treatment. Earth is a utopia and we've terraformed Mars. But not all is well as some old elements are seeking to disrupt the peace in the solar system.

As you can imagine, having essentially five different storylines within a six issue mini-series is a bit difficult to pull off. You can tell Alan Davis had an interesting story with a huge scope, but various pieces of it must have been cut or omitted to fit the restraints of this series. In particular, the details of Sue Storm's mission and the purpose of many of Reed's experiments is just not clear. We get pretty much everything we need from Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm's stories, but we also don't know what is going on with the rogue dissidents until nearly the end of the series. And at that point it's all mashed into one huge battle with too many factions to really make sense.

I did enjoy the sci-fi aspects of the story, and as I stated earlier it works very well within the Fantastic Four setting. Davis's art is truly inspired, you can tell he had a lot of passion for this story and you can see it in the details of the work. The aliens are varied and interesting, the many locations are fun and the end panel of #5 is impressive. I can't imagine how long it took him to draw that many spaceships. I'd recommend this story if you are a big fan of the Fantastic Four, if not then solely for the art and sci-fi elements. I'd try to pick up the trade if possible, it's available in hardcover for around $10.