Fantastic Four #573-578

 Fantastic Four #573-578

Originally released in 2009

Written by Jonathan Hickman

Art by Neil Edwards (#573-4), Dale Eaglesham (#575-8)

The long and winding road to Secret Wars continues, starting with a pair of one-off issues.  Previously, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm were going to a resort planet, with Franklin and Valeria Richards (Reed and Sue's kids) tagging along in secret.  While taking the kids back, they wind up on Nu-World, and this was where I started regretting the idea of skipping roughly 400 issues.  The Fantastic Four have an established history with this place, with Johnny and Ben knowing the people that they encounter, a revolution brewing, and a Hulk Junior who's imprisoned in the palace, but with the end of the world looming, there's no time to explain who any of this is or what's going on.  I felt a little lost as a result.

Valeria gets some good moments in this issue to demonstrate her intellect, though Franklin doesn't do much.  He doesn't seem to have his phenomenal cosmic powers and is more or less an ordinary kid here.  I'm assuming this happened at some point between Lee and Kirby's run and Hickman's run.  Speaking of which, the second issue in this set is Franklin's birthday.  Franklin's age is never specified here, likely to avoid giving specific ages for other characters by association.

Franklin's hero worship of Spider-Man is great, and at first, this issue seemed like a fun one-shot that wouldn't have much in the way of consequences - some light-hearted moments before the next big arc.  And then a future version of Franklin Richards shows up later that night.

In addition to giving Franklin his powers back, he tells gives Valeria a warning, though he's rather cryptic about it.  He says there will be a war between the Four Cities (with the image including a shout-out to Avatar: The Last Airbender in the process), that those who have died cannot be forgotten and a man from the future will save the past, and that all hope lies in Doom.  I'm guessing the future man who saves the past is Franklin himself (it could be Cable, I suppose, but whoever it is, he's presumably tied to the Fantastic Four), and "all hope lies in Doom" seems like it's building up to Secret Wars, though I'm not sure who "those who died" is referring to.

My main problem with these two issues is the art.  Far be it from me to criticize anyone's artwork, but when it comes to Neil Edwards's art, the faces look off, particularly Reed and Valeria in the panel above.  Some panels are better than others, and characters like Spider-Man and the Thing look fine, but some characters look much older than they're supposed to be. (though not to the extent of some art that I've seen, like this panel from the 2021 Eternals series where Captain Marvel and Iron Man look elderly despite the story taking place in the present day)

Fittingly, the next four issues cover each of the Four Cities that Franklin had mentioned (at least, I assume they do - there could be a misdirect) - an underground city created by the High Evolutionary that is intruding on the Mole Man's territory, an underwater city beneath Antarctica claiming to be the Kingdom of Atlantis (Namor, presumably, is not amused by this), a city of "Universal Inhumans" on Earth's moon whose inhabitants were created from the Kree's genetic experiments on countless other races, and a former prison in the Negative Zone that was converted into a city.  Each of these also focuses on a Fantastic Four member (Ben, Sue, Reed, and Johnny, respectively), though Reed doesn't get as much focus during the Inhumans issue as the others do during their issues.

There are some fun moments in these issues (a series of pages with no dialogue in the Atlantis issue, where the team witnesses the beauty of this underwater location and fends off an attack by the mad scientist group for hire, A.I.M.; Johnny arguing with the robot H.E.R.B.I.E. who can only speak in beeps and boops), along with some ominous elements. (the Universal Inhumans make it perfectly clear that, once Black Bolt returns from the Kree homeworld of Hala, they plan to take over the Earth)  Dale Eaglesham's return definitely helps with the art; characters like Franklin and Valeria look more like their age, and the facial expressions look more natural.  I don't know if Hickman had Secret Wars in mind when writing Franklin's prophecy, or if he kept it vague and figured he'd come up with something later on, but I'm interested to see how this War of the Four Cities plays out.