Though the most recent Fantastic Four Epic Collection is named for Atlantis Rising, an overpopulated and ultimately uninteresting 1995 crossover, the book’s strength lies in the preceding issues, culminating in the monumental 400th issue of Fantastic Four.
Atlantis Rising begins with a story that could be seen as a proto-Reckoning War. A rogue, power-mad Watcher known as Aron prepares to become the final Watcher in existence. Aided by an evil version of Reed Richards, Aron summons versions of the Fantastic Four’s greatest villains to distract one-half of our heroes. The other half find themselves witnessing the rest of the intergalactic race of Watchers stand in judgement of the mysterious, all-powerful Celestials. The stakes are impossible, and the Fantastic Four family is not what it once was.
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This was the tail end of the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan years, a seven-year run on the title that leaned heavily into the soap-opera roots of the title. These issues are burdened by dangling threads and melodrama, each twisting narrative branch more convoluted than the last.
In those rocky mid-’90s years, 1994 and 1995, Fantastic Four had already seen the extreme-ification that had hit most other Marvel books. The Invisible Woman had already had her role as a gun-toting sex symbol, wearing one of the decade’s most reviled costume redesigns, with its notorious boob window. Her husband, Mister Fantastic, had recently been “killed off” (as Superman had been the year prior), vaporized by (and alongside) FF nemesis, Doctor Doom.
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Young Franklin Richards had also undergone radical (and totally rad) changes, having been whisked, Cable-like, into the future by his morally bankrupt, super-scientist grandfather, and returned fully grown and sporting the psychic powers; he was subsequently spun off into his own short-lived title, Future Force.
Not to leave the grittiness to the Richards family, the Thing had recently been mangled by Wolverine; his self-loathing had become more intense. He becomes convinced that he is too hideous, now, to reconnect with Alicia Masters, who had recently been impersonated by the Johnny Storm-loving Skrull, Lyja.
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As jumbled as all those plotlines might seem, DeFalco and Ryan were nonetheless committed to a sort of purist commitment to the franchise; while books like Avengers West Coast were radically altered to Force Works and Spider-Man was overwhelmed by symbiotes and replaced with clones, Fantastic Four kept ahold of running themes from the roots of its earliest days. Though Doom was gone, his bio-engineered son maintained a Doom-like presence. Atlantis Rising keeps the books’ bond to the Inhumans and Namor alive. For all its turbulent reimagining, Fantastic Four maintained the shape of the stories that came before.
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Issue #400, with its foil cover and its double size, might seem to represent all the things that the ’90s are reviled for, and yet the book’s heart never falters. It feels earnestly itself, unwilling to compromise in its cosmic soap opera no matter how many extreme, miserable spinoffs and gimmick covers. Fantastic Four Epic Collection: Atlantis Rising straddles the line, with its two halves of what worked and what did not during the mid-’90s.
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