Marvel’s Grand Design series hands off the massive, unwieldy histories of the publisher’s major franchises to unique, individualistic comics creators, allowing them to compress decades of history into a handful of issues and express their style upon that history.
The results, while clear labors of love, always struggle under the weight of their subject matter: how does a single creator stuff 60 years of comics continuity into two issues? And what does that mean for the legitibility of the truncated narrative?
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In all cases – including the late Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design, which was allowed six issues rather than two – it makes the books impossibly dense, as much a labor to read straight through as they were to create. These aren’t Official Handbook-style summaries, but visual odes to the properties they attempt to cover. I don’t believe Grand Design books are meant to be read cover to cover in single sittings; they are meant to peruse like coffee table books.
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Tom Scioli’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design certainly doesn’t attempt to craft a cohesive story. Laid out primarily in modular, 25-grid pages, the book feels somewhat oppressive in its regimented density. Each page feels like a clinical barrage of panels, each utilizing Scioli’s impressive cartooning skills and expressive color usage to miniaturize the massive, cosmic-level storytelling of Marvel’s First Family.
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While there is a historian’s approach to the book – the comic is laid out in the narrative chronology, not the publishing, along the lines of the later History of the Marvel Universe – there isn’t a sense of cohesiveness; it would be impossible to present all the salient narrative beats, let alone a complete accounting of detail.
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Readers will get a handful of panels, here or there, which suggest the events of a single issue: four, maybe five out of the 25 on a page. How much consideration each story is given is wholly up to Scioli, not the narrative weight of the events; the whole origin of the Silver Surfer, for example, is related in three wordless panels, while Fantastic Four #6 (in which Doctor Doom launches the FF and Namor into space) takes up most of one page.
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That’s because this – like all the Grand Design books – is the result of one creator synthesizing the whole through their own lens; what interests or amuses Scioli gets the biggest treatment. Often those things are funny rather than epic.
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While Scioli is clearly having fun – many of the small panels have jokey energy, humorous insight to the zany outdatedness of classic comics – Fantastic Four: Grand Design lacks the sort of formal novelty found elsewhere in the Grand Design tradition. Jim Rugg’s Hulk: Grand Design played with a Rugg’s childhood relationship to that comic book, throwing stickers and notebook doodles into the design aesthetic, while the Piskor flooded his book with simulated Ben Day dots, kinetic panel grids, and action.
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This makes Scioli’s work drier, and more straightforward: this is work that feels as dense and rigid as it might have felt researching for the book: 300 issues of a classic comic read at an impossible pace, blurring together to these simplified snapshots of the central ideas. This isn’t a book that accurately recollects Fantastic Four, it’s a book that illustrates the impressions that comic made upon a single member of its audience.
Fantastic Four: Grand Design is no less a visual spectacle for its restrained aesthetic, and it stands next to its Grand Design peers in fine form. It doesn’t, however, make for an easy read; it was never meant to. Scioli’s eye for what makes the Fantastic Four fun is reduced, here, to amusing snapshot, celebrated but understated.
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