Ultimate Fantastic Four Annual #2

Written by Mike Carey

Pencils & Cover by Stuart Immonen

Additional Pencils by Frazer Iriving

 

If you needed a taste of what the new Fantastic Four team is going to be like when Carey takes over, don’t look here. Like the other Annual to come out so far, the main characters take a back seat to introduce and flesh out other characters, namely the Mole Man and a group of student scientists working for the Baxter Corporation.

 

Those four students are working in a secret military complex making the kind of weapons the Baxter building used to specialize in until the Fantastic Four made it their personal base. The Mole Man comes in and steals them away in typical Mole Man fashion—he digs a big hole in the ground for the building to fall into.

 

The rest of the story is fetching as Mole Man explains that he is building the same great society he meant for the FF. Except now he’s discovered the lost civilization of Lemuria and wishes to use their underground kingdom as a foundation for this new society. The kids rebel and then surprise everyone by stating their intention to build exactly what the Mole Man wants, just without him cause he’s a crazy villain.

 

A lot of the issue is taken up with flashbacks, drawn by Frazer Iriving, that first explains the Mole Man’s history and then goes on to creatively tell the rest of the story once it becomes clear that the four student scientists have taken over the narrative. I honestly can’t place any of their names but I recognize some of the hints on where their characters might be going—one of them controls bee’s for instance (remember all my ravings about Swarm in my Top Ten Worst Spidey Villains?). So I’m not exactly sure who these characters are supposed to be.

 

Mole Man is properly placed somewhere between a harmless egomaniac and a realistic threat because of the trouble he stirs up. That trouble is in the form of the Lemuria’s old zoo which housed the large monsters that the FF were known to fight during the Kirby era. Like many of the re-imaginings, this one is setup to make the villains’ existence more plausible.

 

We’re left with a warning that the student scientists may be in over their heads and the FF might have more monster wrangling in their future.

 

The issue amounts to a large setup for future tales and that’s about how all the Annuals have gone. It is an unfortunate side-effect of decreeing that all the Annuals must now ‘matter.’ Still, it is a good comic that had me chuckling a bit from the Mole Man’s version of his biography.

 

Rating - 7