Long-running comics continuities tend to leave a lot of concepts lying around. Plot threads are left unresolved, characters are untouched, and conceptual seeds lie unnurtured. That’s the nature of such a massive enterprise, one in which dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of comics creators engage in the creation of new ideas; not all of those ideas will land.
Every so often, a creator will come along and try to marry some disconnected concepts together; sometimes, as in the recently reprinted Earth X, those marriages go on to produce incredible and providential offspring. Other times, as in the comics collected in Fantastic Four Epic Collection: The More Thigns Change…, disparate ideas lead to a muddled – if action-packed – soup.
Primarily written by comics legend Steve Englehart, this volume offers a tumultuous brew of disconnected Big Ideas, leading an unusual lineup from Middle Eastern nations to Wakanda, from Limbo to the realm of the Beyonder. The pace between these adventures is hyper-kinetic and nonstop, and yet the flow of the adventure is somehow natural; as impossible as it sounds, a trip to the lair of the Mole Man leads, by way of invisible teleportation, to a city of Tigra-adjacent cat people and, from there, to Belasco’s version of Limbo (and so on, and so forth).
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There is fresh ground to be covered here: this is the period during which Ben Grimm mutates further (and Sharon Ventura’s Ms. Marvel mutates to be more Thing-like), but these ideas are somewhat rushed, as are the conflicts in each issue. Villains are introduced, battles are joined, and locations are sped through, all in service of tightly-contained episodic issues.
A lot of ideas and characters visited here are leftover from Englehart’s work on West Coast Avengers: the team faces Master Pandemonium, as did that team of Avengers; the cat city was discovered in WCA, as were the portals which whisk our team from one place to another.
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Other ideas had been lying stagnant: Comet Man plays a role, here, after six underwhelming issues of his own. Belasco appears courtesy of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men and Magik: Storm and Illyana. Near the end of the book, Englehart sets out to define the Beyonder after both Secret Wars; he does so using the Cosmic Cube, Kubik, and the Shaper of Worlds, all long-standing and mysterious aspects of the Marvel Mythology.
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For all its manic meandering, The More Things Change… offers up a snapshot of the late 1980s dynamism at Marvel comics: creators were looking to connect the disconnected, to remind readers of the wider slate of characters with constant guest stars. It was an era insistent on its relationship to itself; the franchise-wide crossover had just come into play, and comics wanted to play with that energy within standalone books. The More Things Change… is hyperactive and engaging. It’s weird, but its oddball charms are inescapable. Few people would call this era of Fantastic Four indispensable, but fewer people could deny its excitement.
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