Spina, Sam – The Frantastic Four

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The Frantastic Four

Do you automatically steer clear of any small press comics that you think might be super hero parodies? You do? Come closer to the screen so I can punch you. OK, maybe it’s not always a terrible rule, but you might as well punch yourself in the face if you skip out on this one. So much comic for $5! Things start off with Frank Frantastic being picked to fly to Neptune to check out some strange life sign readings. Frank has always lived in the shadow of his more successful older brother, who “died” in an explosion years before (Frank never bought the official story). He makes it to Nepture, discovers a substance that appears to be alien in nature, and then discovers the creature who was shitting out this other substance. Frank decides that this creature is too much like him to be turned over the government (even though, brilliantly, the creature never says a word), so he makes a plan to sneak him out of the shuttle and back to his apartment, using the hilariously unlikely means of putting a sheet over the creature’s head and leading him out of the space center. Once back at his apartment Frank introduces this creature to his roommate (a robot made years earlier by Frank’s brother), the creature is confronted by another creature who lived underground (he came to the surface after sensing the “evil” nature of the alien), the alien is given a name (“Celery”), and Frank draws the conclusion that they are now the Frantastic Four and that they should fight crime for a living. The rest of this damned hefty book deals with them trying out a number of different careers (as it turns out that nobody pays you to fight crime in such a fashion, and there really isn’t all that much crime to fight to begin with), showing what happened to the crew a couple of years after the events of the comic, and an epilogue where it shows how their lives ended up years later. This makes the possibility of a second issue of this series unlikely, which is a damned shame, but you basically have an entire series crammed into this one comic anyway. I’m increasingly of the opinion that Sam can do no wrong, and this comic has damned near set that opinion in stone. Buy this comic, laugh a whole bunch of times, feel better about the world for a bit! $5

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Posted on January 17, 2013, in Reviews and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Spina, Sam – The Frantastic Four.

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