This week the Fantastic Four are tying into the King in Black event, but in reality, it’s a story about the Human Torch and his soulmate Sky. It’s a story about love, trusting those who enter your family unit from the outside, and how an alien invasion can complicate things further. Dan Slott and Ze Carlos tell a story about love, settling in, and facing an all-new kind of threat.
This is an interesting tie-in issue for King in Black, and really events in general, since it carries forward a few plot threads, focuses on two main characters, and then adds the tie-in angle at the end of the book. It’s economical by spreading out different kinds of story elements and not letting the event itself take over. Unfortunately, though, this waters the issue down a bit.
The main story deals with Human Torch and Sky and the discomfort Invisible Woman has with their soulmate status. She doesn’t believe in it, or at least doesn’t trust it’s legit. That allows Slott and Carlos to explore their relationship a bit and show us the two characters speak on the same level for a spell. That is interrupted by some family drama that is a touch surprising, but soon that bleeds into Knull’s attack.
Starting to wonder how helpful Franklin can be without powers.
Credit: Marvel Comics
The last half of the book or so deals with the characters reacting to Knull’s attack. Smartly, Slott has tied Sky being confronted with a surprising turn in Knull’s attack. This adds a layer of relationship drama and emotional drama onto the Knull attack. Essentially, it makes the attack more personal to the team.
Carlos’s art, along with Jesus Aburtov’s colors, is solid, super detailed work. The layout design can feel a bit stiff with a lack of flow from panel to panel, but everything in every panel is appealing to the eye. The character emotions are spot on and you’ll feel sorry for Sky throughout this book. She ends up stealing the show thanks to Carlos’s work. The work is competent and works.
Fantastic Four #29 is a good start to the tie-in storyline, though it focuses so much on Sky it may lose readers. Instead of this being about the team, it has decided to tie its cart to this rather new character. The emotional story works in a clever way, though, and gives the story purpose.
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