The Four Color Media Monitor

An editor at Newsarama is urging Marvel to relaunch the FF as soon as possible. But what good would it really do? They say:

The even more-epic-than-expected-tranking (get it?) of 20th Century Fox’s reboot has cracked open a door for Marvel Comics that might not been open at all if Josh Trank’s film was even a limited success. But that now-open door has an expiration date and may close again in short order, leaving Marvel with what it has before this debacle started – a franchise of an elevated stature that it holds perhaps due more to historical relevance than commercial success … or in other words, a title more beloved than actually read.

Well there's a reason why - modern writing became so bad and hindered with crossovers, who would really want to read the post-2000 tales? On which note, they don't help the situation by sugarcoating the following scripters:

The latter is a problem Marvel’s first family has been facing for some time. Despite being put in arguably top-notch creative hands – Jonathan Hickman, James Robinson to name a recent couple – the title really hasn’t been near the top of Marvel’s depth chart since the John Byrne days of the early 1980s, and there are reasonable questions to asked about how viable the nuclear family superhero concept is – again commercially – in 2015.

The vocal, seemingly hardcore fanbase the franchise holds seems far more interested in a faithful movie adaption (and criticizing anything that isn’t that) than a monthly comic book series. And for a time, some of the comic book readers that were interested viewed Marvel Comics as a co-conspirator with Fox in keeping a “true” FF from them.

Well that's interesting. But the truth is, the company executives are the ones more interested in movie adaptation than comics per se. And Hickman/Robinson have done the FF no justice on their part, mostly because even their efforts tied into the flood of crossovers just as much as every and any other writer's for at least a decade now. I wouldn't call their stuff top notch. Nor would I say the FF hadn't been on top since Byrne last wrote it; there was a run by Walt Simonson in the late 80s-early 90s that was pretty good. But by the time the Onslaught crossover came about, that's when it really began to collapse under poor writing.

...Of course, nothing in comic books stays dead or missing forever, and while it’s probably only a matter of time (years?) before the “All-New” Fantastic Four make their quadumphant return, with the idea that time away will help build anticipation for a comeback, now might be as hot as the iron will get for Marvel.

The FF’s catastrophic movie failure has provided Marvel an opportunity – as opposed to being part of a problem, they can be the solution. They can be the party that gives fans back a true, faithful, high-profile Fantastic Four, at a time when the appetite while perhaps artificially inflated, might be as strong as it’ll get for some time.

With Axel Alonso and Joe Quesada running the show? I doubt it. The window of opportunity closed long ago, and any relaunch will only wind up with mediocre sales numbers again pretty fast. Since any FF relaunch would likely be pretentious in storytelling (and artwork would be the same or just wasted on poor writing), some Fantastic Fans would probably think it better than new ongoing series be left untried, and stick with older efforts pre-2000 instead. At this point, hardly anybody's really interested in FF continuing in new volumes, or any Marvel superhero books at that. So I think there's little point in asking for a relaunch when it would only end up losing more money than it gains. For the sake of the FF's better image, that's why it's best to just let it rest, along with the rest of the MCU.

Labels: bad editors, crossoverloading, dreadful writers, Fantastic Four, marvel comics