Midnight Fantastic Four #1
"Storm Systems"
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Kev Walker
Colorist: Frank D'Armata
Cover Artist: Kev Walker and Guru-eFX
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Reed Richards is a brilliant but distracted man who discovers something called the "Negative Zone," and with three companions sets out to explore this uncharted land.
That's a statement we've heard before, but not like this.
The Door That Should Never Be Opened
In a cave beneath a cliffside lighthouse, an eerie purple glow emanates over the crashing waves.
At the New York Institute of Technology, Reed Richards is distracted by a mathematical formula he's been trying to solve. Unfortunately, he's in a meeting with his superiors at the time. Despite a brief distraction where a bird slams into the window and dies, the meeting ends with Reed being fired.
As Reed leaves the building, he stops to inspect the bird's body—which begins sprouting bizarre tendrils from every orifice...
Later, Reed breaks into the science building where he is met by his lab assistant Victor. Reed takes these strange purple pills that make his eyes turn purple, and seem to help with his deductive reasoning—at the expense of his awareness of the room around him. This lack of awareness leads to a horrible accident, leaving lasting scars on both he and Victor...
Several weeks later, while Victor is being kept alive in Latveria through bizarre means by his mother, Reed is released from prison by Sue Storm of the company Storm Systems. He also meets her bodyguard, Ben Grimm, and her pilot brother, Johnny Storm. Sue explains to Reed that the boundary between their world and the Negative Zone has been weakened, which has allowed glimpses of the eldritch horrors within the Zone to peek through...
And she wants him to open the gate to it.
Formula for Disaster
Marvel Comics has been hyping up their new Midnight books for what feels like forever at this point. I myself went from completely uninterested, to intrigued, to cautiously optimistic about all of the titles. We knew that Midnight X-Men was going to feature vampires, and Midnight Spider-Man was going full body horror. The book that we knew the least going in was Midnight Fantastic Four.
Although the core elements of Fantastic Four are immediately recognizable here, things veer sharply to the left very quickly. Reed Richards is the same brilliant-but-distractible man that he's ever been, but here he appears to be addicted to some sort of drug that actively affects his perceptions. This leads to a lab accident with his colleague Victor, but again there are twists. Here the accident is one hundred percent Reed's fault, and Victor is more than just scarred—instead he's clinging to a sliver of life, with barely enough of his body intact to even qualify as a person anymore. But his mother, who here is the one in a green cloak with a metal mask, won't let him die—using a contraption that would make Frankenstein proud, she attempts to prolong her son's existence.
The changes continue. Sue Storm is the head of an aeronautics company called Storm Systems, who are apparently known for their rockets exploding more than anything else. Her brother Johnny is a pilot who lost his legs in some sort of crash. And Ben Grimm is a scarred brute who serves as her bodyguard and hired muscle. The tightly-knit family unit that we're used to in the Fantastic Four, this is not.
This is very much a setup issue, and it's clear that this is going to be a slow-burn series. This premiere issue nonetheless manages to pack a ton of content into its thirty-four pages of story. We are introduced to all of our major players and given a sense of everyone's history. And through it all there is a building sense of eeriness and dread, and a feeling that something horrible is just around the corner. Through Reed's multiple hallucinatory episodes, we get a glimpse of the eldritch horrors that presumably lay on the other side of the Negative Zone gate. Where hell resides, according to the last whispers of Victor.
Reed Richards is very much the lead here, and so he gets the lion's share of screen time and character development. This makes sense, but every variation of the FF that I can think of always begins with him and one of his experiments or discoveries. Here we get a take on him that is the same brilliant man we're used to, one who's on the verge of a discovery that will change the world. The difference is, this time he's also a drug-addicted man who's seeing horrible things, and the discovery he's made is likely to doom the world. So by setting the initial focus on Reed, we get a sense of how this book is going to play out. There's no sense of wonder in discovery here—no, rather there's a feeling that something horrible is around every corner and once the bell is rung, it can't be un-rung.
I'm curious to see how Victor (presumably Von Doom, but the book never calls him more than just his first name) plays out over the course of this series. As Reed's lab assistant, he's immediately positioned as inferior to Doctor Richards. And there's no ambiguity with the lab accident here, it's one hundred percent Reed's fault. So the ambiguity we're used to when it comes to the relationship between these two men—is Victor right and it's Reed's fault, or is it truly Victor's fault and his ego just won't let him accept that—is gone. So how will that change Victor's character going forward?
As for the rest of the members of our titular Four, Sue Storm gets the most time this issue. She appears to be the head of the Storm Systems company, and although she's clearly not on Reed's level, she knows a little bit about a lot of things. Although it can of course change as time goes on, I have a hard time seeing these versions of Sue and Reed ending up together. Similarly, I have a hard time seeing this version of the quartet building that "family unit" feel that is so synonymous with the Fantastic Four. Even Sue's relationship with Johnny barely feels familial, even though they're siblings. Here, he lost his legs in some sort of crash, and he seems to be distant from everyone around him as a result.
No Wonder in Discovery
Benjamin Percy has been writing a ton of comics lately, which makes it easy to forget that he actually started out as a novelist. Although he's written in multiple genres, he's spent a fair amount of time writing in the horror space. So a title like this is right in his wheelhouse. Although the story starts slow and continues to build feelings of dread and unease, it never feels slow. As we move from scene to scene, Percy continues to introduce characters and concepts, leaving enough things glimpsed but unexplained so that there is plenty of fodder for future issues. His characterization is strong, with each member of the cast having just enough recognizable traits while at the same time taking them in different directions.
I was unsure about Kev Walker as the artist on this book. His art has always been a little angular and almost abstract for my taste, and I was concerned about how he would fit on a horror-toned title like this. I shouldn't have worried—his work here is very strong and fits the story excellently. His take on Reed is a little younger than we're used to, but even more than that he's very disheveled. His hair sticks all over the place, and he's clearly not touched a razor in some time. The traditionally put-together Reed Richards, this is not. Similarly, Sue is much sharper and more business-like, while Ben and Johnny have much rougher looks. The eldritch horrors glimpsed throughout the issue are where Walker really shines, as his style fits their bizarre and shifting proportions and makes them look as strange and terrible as they should.
Frank D'Armata's colors here are his usual strong work, but he has toned down his palette here and given everything a darker tint. The color purple is heavily present throughout—Reed's eyes turn that color when he takes the strange pills, some of the eldritch horrors he glimpses are that color, and there are multiple instances of panels being shadowed in shades of purple rather than black. It gives the whole thing a consistent look as it continues to build an eerie and uneasy atmosphere. He also uses an unnatural green glow for the scenes in Latveria, as Victor is forced to continue living through his mother's bizarre experiments.
Beyond the Gate
I came away from Midnight Fantastic Four #1 pleasantly surprised by what I found. It's very much a slow burn, taking its time to introduce and develop the characters, but there are enough glimpses of the eldritch horrors that lay just beyond the Negative Zone's gate that feelings of dread continue to slowly build as the issue progresses. There's a very strong groundwork being laid here, and if the creative team can keep things at this level of quality, this could very well be the sleeper hit of the Midnight line.