By Zack Quaintance — As much as I like the creative team behind this week’s Fantastic Four - Life Story #1 — and I like them a lot…writer Mark Russell has been a favorite new voice in comics of late, and artist Sean Izaaske has done stellar work for Marvel from Champions on — I remain unconvinced that the publisher’s Life Story comics work on a deep conceptual level. This is the second Life Story series Marvel has published, and the idea is that these books re-imagine Marvel’s classic characters…just now aging in real time, intertwining with history as they do. The first series focused on Spider-Man, and this week we get Fantastic Four.

The problem I had with that Spider-Man book flared up again as I read Fantastic Four - Life Story #1, and it’s that these comics inherently must point their narrative focus backward. This takes away any chance of surprise, and it also severely limits the creative team’s ability to say something new. Instead, it forces these comics to be compared to their classic predecessors (especially in their first issues), often unfavorably, given the work that came before shaped the industry for generations. Why, I wondered while reading this book, does Fantastic Four #1 need to be re-told? And why do we need the coming of Galactus done over, just now with a couple of panels wherein Reed Richards has a meeting with whatever sitting president?

One of the defining qualities of monthly comic book storytelling is the speed in which the stories are produced, making them obsessively of the moment in which they are born. With a proliferation of online comics libraries and new reader technologies, past eras have never been so accessible. These Life Story comics are then given the unenviable task of being better than simply going back and reading the source material. The gimmick within this is that the creators can look back at history and weave in context and current events. That is, essentially, what’s for sale here.

To me, it all just feels uninteresting at a core level, regardless of the quality of the writing and the artwork, both of which are exemplary in Fantastic Four - Life Story #1. The comic instead made me want to see what talents like Russell and Izaaske could do together on a Fantastic Four comic that wasn’t shackled with this backward-facing gimmickry. Russell is at his best when his work can satirize the times in which we live — be it the theology-superhero mashup Second Coming, or the wealth disparity riff, Billionaire Island — and maybe he’ll be able to do so with future issues of this series. This debut book certainly had a lot of boxes to check to set things up and make the idea behind it recognizable.

Still, I think I’d rather see him with a freer take on these characters, something like writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Filipe Andrade were able to do with the absolutely excellent family vacation-turned-horror-show debacle, Fantastic Four Road Trip #1. That book let Cantwell and Andrade both play to their strengths in interesting ways that brought something new to the characters, making it the most memorable Fantastic Four comic in I don’t know how many years.

So, while Fantastic Four Life Story #1 is a well-done comic, it’s inherently stuck in the past, going toe-to-toe with the formative and influential all-time great comics made by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and it’s just not able to dissuade me from the notion that my time would be better spent going back and re-reading that run once again.

Overall: In spite of its excellent creative team, Fantastic Four - Life Story #1 leaves me wishing I’d just re-read early FF comics. I also found myself wanting Russell and Isaazke to do a different Fantastic Four comic, one free of backward-facing gimmickry, played out via occasional appearances of whatever sitting president. 6.5/10

REVIEW: Fantastic Four - Life Story #1

Fantastic Four - Life Story #1
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Sean Izaaske
Colorist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Publisher: Marvel Comics
In the tradition of SPIDER-MAN: LIFE STORY, and in celebration of the FF’s 60th Anniversary, comes this series setting the lives of the fabulous foursome in real time across the years! Amid the backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race, a terrible accident gives the Fantastic Four great powers, a terrible secret, and entangles them in the history of their planet.
Price: $4.99
Buy It Here: Fantastic Four - Life Story #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.