The First Family’s title finally remembers it’s about families in Fantastic Four #31. Written by Dan Slott, drawn by R.B. Silva, colored by Jesus Arburtov, and lettered by Joe Caramagna, Fantastic Four #31 finds the Richards Family attempting to ground themselves in the wake of Knull. Reed has a boys trip planned with Ben while the rest of the family deals with their own simmering personal dramas. The Coming of Galactus this ain’t, but a step in the right direction at least.
Where the suffering flark has THIS Fantastic Four been?!
With the goop all gone and the title resuming its regular Richards Family Programing, Fantastic Four #31 FINALLY feels like an upward trend for the embattled modern era.
After the Baxter Building is seemingly restored around the Forever Gate, the family attempts to settle back into their version of normal. Naturally that means Reed firing up the Forever Gate and planning an exploratory jaunt into the unknown with his best friend Ben Grimm. While that hook alone might have sustained one of the earlier issues, writer Dan Slott actually builds out well into the rest of the cast’s branching plots for once.
Left largely to their own devices, the rest of the cast all have quietly engrossing scenes to themselves. And nobody is left out of the page count this month! We get short but affecting scenes with Alicia Masters and her new alien children, Sue, Johnny, Franklin, Valeria, and even Bentley-23 gets in on the fun fluff throughout the whole page count. All while Reed and Ben face their own long-overdue (and handsomely rendered) emotional reckoning in a “Thought Space” with each other in the wake of the Forever Gate’s vision of a future where Ben kills Reed.
Now, does all of this work? Of course not. In particular, Val’s scene is a little…oddly reductive. Meaning that she seemingly has “sworn off boy/girl stuff” and is pursuing pure science in lieu of coupling. Though this spurs a pretty funny Bentley-23 moment in which he uses the Forever Gate to jump Val’s “ex” (AKA the gross prince character from the opening arc), I can’t help but feel if this is just more of Slott not really knowing what to do with Val beyond comedic beats and plot functions.
Franklin too is still coming across rather badly I am afraid. He gets positioned for some interesting places, like being placed into a “super” therapy with Marvel z-lister Trauma in which he has to talk to himself (the “thing he fears most”), but Slott’s characterization for him still seems to begin and end with “surly” post his depowering. Which is a real bummer, for sure.
But even with these caveats, I am still genuinely struck by how much I enjoyed Fantastic Four #31. By finally allowing the title to focus on the family’s interpersonal relationship, framed against the plot convenience of the “super science”, comic book logic at play, and a far more grounded scope, #31 finally just feels organically FF. It’s not about always making it “important”. Nor is it always about making it “groundbreaking”. It’s just about making it FUN and about an actual family.
And speaking of fun, holy cats, is the artwork of R.B. Silva and Jesus Aburtov a whole heap of fun this month. One of the things this title usually always has going for it, despite the shaky scripts, is the consistently great artwork and #31 is no exception. Thriving within the more personalized scope, Silva and Aburtov provide ussome nicely expressive expository scenes, highlighting the family’s wide range of expressions (save Franklin, who is locked firmly in a scowling teen mode) and their tender connections to one another.
This tenderness is cut nicely too with a keen slice of action in the “Thought Space”. Attacked by their own darkened thoughts and shade of enemies past, Reed and Ben have to stand against literal negative thoughts, which Silva and Aburtov render with a fun bombast that feels right at home in the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.
Fantastic Four #31 finally feels like family again. And it only took something as simple as just focusing on them as PEOPLE first and HEROES second to get it there. Who woulda thunk, right? Time will tell if the book sustains this energy, especially heading into the dubious looking “Wedding of Doctor Doom”, but for now, I am happy I at least got one issue like Fantastic Four #31 to sooth my near-constant grousing about this volume.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
