In this review of Fantastic Four #24, the team encounters an alien whose strength and intelligence is more than they expected. But how much trouble could a squid-like alien be?
Fantastic Four #24
Written by: Ryan North
Art by: Carlos Gómez
Main Cover: Alex Ross
Variant Covers: Chris Allen, Todd Nauck, Tom Reilly
Page Count: 28 pages
Release Date: August 28, 2024
This review contains spoilers
Fantastic Four #24 begins with an alien, a comical-looking and squid-like semi-humanoid, is enclosed in an invisible forcefield, it changes tactics to persuading the FF to help it. It says its name is Zrixa and it hails from a planet where its people failed to discover any other form of space travel, but by shrinking down and entering a spaceship carved into a proton, they were able to propel themselves into space at the speed of light. Time dilation would keep the occupant from experiencing much passage of time, while a billion years might pass outside it. Thousands of these aliens were both rich enough to afford to fund the project and had the desire to undertake it.
Zrixa explains all this while the Fantastic Four lead it to the controls for their hadron particle accelerator, which Reed is being asked to modify to send a particle into space; Zrixa is suspiciously anxious to leave and keep exploring. When Zrixa realizes Reed is stalling, she makes the remaining modifications herself and teleports herself and her ship into the collider.
The team splits up, with half going to stop Zrixa while the other half stay to decipher incoming information from Zrixa’s homeworld. Zrixa is conveniently fireproof and so super-strong she is able to brush the Thing aside and she is able to relaunch herself into space in her proton ship. Meanwhile, the information-gathering side of the team manage to decode the alien information and learn Zrixa’s secrets – that the process of powering the proton ships required harvesting special particles from their sun, that Zrixa had harvested so many that their sun died, and the last act of her species was to send a barrage of proton ships containing nuclear weapons after her.
Reed alone has a suit that will allow him to reduce in size and be able to go after Zrixa. He manages to catch her and reveal to her the flaw in her plan – that without taking the time to direct their flight, the ship isn’t aimed anywhere and will travel the universe for billions of years until the proton fades as the universe dies.
All this happens, for them, in a matter of seconds, and Reed and Zrixa are dying in the void of a dying universe when a giant glowing hand reaches out to save Reed. The giant presence promises to send Reed back in time to help his family against yet another big threat and, at the last moment, Reed thinks the presence is Franklin, so either his son or father.
It turns out to be super-easy to save Earth from a rain of nukes – Sue just creates an invisible funnel and redirects them towards the sun. One last proton-ship is discovered, this one containing an infant member of Zrixa’s race, like a squid-like Superboy.
Analysis
I have not read the Fantastic Four regularly since 2005. If, like me, you have not kept up with the book for some time, you will still recognize at least most of the characters. Alicia is now an equal member of the team, which is very cool because I had done the same thing myself in my fan-fiction years earlier. Franklin and Val are still young, but equal members of the team. There are also two other kids there who appear to be a Kree boy and a Skrull girl, but they barely say a word or do anything, so I still have no clue to their backstory.
There once was a time when comic book writers had to treat every issue as somebody’s first issue; they had to catch you up on all the backstory you absolutely had to know to enjoy that issue. Sometimes that was simply a roll call on the splash page with everyone’s face and name.
Everyone has new costumes that look like half-armor with glow-in-the-dark “4” emblems. The armored suits make them look more muscular, which is disappointing because I was always more of a fan of the loose-fitting uniforms. I don’t see the need for these new looks.
Reed is the same character. I assume Ben is the same character; he barely does a thing in this issue, so it is hard to tell. Last I saw, Mark Waid had given Johnny a story arc where he had to prove himself to be a mature adult; nowadays, the shorthand for Johnny’s maturity is a Texas Twister-like mustache. Sue I hardly recognize.
Apparently Marvel has decided that Sue cannot be equal to Reed unless they are both scientists, so at some point Sue must have taken some correspondence courses and become an …archeologist? I’m not sure how being an archaeologist even helps in the story here with decoding the alien language, but this is Marvel Comics and biologists can invent killer robots, so sure?
I am not just here to rant from under my curmudgeon hat. There are things I do like here. I like that this is part two of a two-part story. Marvel used to do two-part stories all the time before stories became slowed down to trade paperback length. I am pleased that Ryan North is creating new villains instead of using the same classic villains for the zillionth time. I am pleased to see hard science fiction in a Fantastic Four story, where it would seem most appropriate, except…
Relativity has never worked the same way in the Marvel Universe and there is no time dilation at near light speeds. Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau) was not a time traveler. The Silver Surfer never simply circled the Earth at the size of a proton at near light speed to see the future. There are other details we are probably not meant to think about too hard, like why Sue isn’t on the “stop Zrixa” team when the only power they’ve seen slow Zrixa down at this point is her force fields. Or why Zrixa’s ship has an easily opened hatch at all if she can just teleport in and out of her ship.
But we know why we’re really still buying Fantastic Four comic books like Fantastic Four #24 after 717 issues and that’s nostalgia. We get that in spades in the cover art alone, featuring the FF surrounded by many classic Kirby creations (including most of the royal family of the Inhumans and – wooo! – Torgo! We never see Torgo anymore). See? It still gets to me too. And, for that, I give this issue a…
Marvel Comics provided The Comic Book Spot with an advance copy of The Fantastic Four #24 for review purposes. Find more reviews here. If you would like to buy a copy of this title, and help support the Comic Book Spot at the same time, consider purchasing this book at Amazon, My Comic Shop, or at Things From Another World.
