In his introduction to Fantastic Four: Imaginauts, superstar writer Mark Waid admits to not loving the Fantastic Four, a detail that feels impossible given the man’s overwhelming commitment to the superhero genre. His work on the properties of the Big Two was already prolific and definitive: only six years before taking on Fantastic Four, Waid had distilled the entire DC Universe into one of the great modern comics masterpieces Kingdom Come. Two years later, he’d relaunched Captain America after the unfortunate hiccup of Heroes Reborn, injecting a series with new life.
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This is a writer who knew the classics, knew how to get at the heart of the classics, knew how to play into tropes and subvert them at the same time. But he admits to being a bit out of touch with Marvel’s First Family.
He took a risky but brilliant first step in Imaginauts: he ignored the urge to tell the sorts of massive, cosmic-scale stories the team is best known for, opting to dig into the characters of the stories he was going to tell. In his first issue, he introduces a market researcher that may as well be Waid himself. Charged to understand the team so as to better sell the team using the in-Universe licensing of the franchise (comics, toys, even that HERBIE cartoon).
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Shertzer, Waid’s self-insert character, is charged with spending a week with the team, trying to get at the bottom of what makes them worth selling. He accompanies them to microscopic universes, floats above New York City on invisible platforms, and sees how the team interacts with one another (and their fans). He comes to see a core goodness at the heart of the Fantastic Four – the very goodness Waid would have to understand to do his job.
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It’s a quick, thesis statement of an issue: I’ve found what is important here, and what is important is character. The rest of the book provides ample evidence to support that thesis. The Fantastic Four members feel human in Imaginauts, feel lived-in and familial in a way that more classic FF stories pay more lip-service to than achieve on their own. This is a family, and the way they speak to one another – and the way they support one another – feels natural even as they get themselves into unnatural situations.
Where Shertzer had the team itself as shepherds, Waid writes that he had late artist Mike Wieringo, who did bring a pre-existing love for the characters into the series. Wieringo’s love is apparent in every stylized, hyperactive panel. His FF aren’t prone to standing still, and things have more animated energy than that old FF cartoon mentioned above. His artwork speaks not just to the human center of the group, but of a living, bouyant world at large, peopled with rampaging giant bugs, endless property damage, and heroes in motion. Even his faceless data monsters feel in motion.
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Because of Waid’s reluctance – and Wieringo’s love – Fantastic Four by Waid & Wieringo: Imaginauts is a perfect book for readers who are on the fence about the Fantastic Four. It is a book of exciting, bombastic stories, but none so big as to lose touch with what makes these heroes and their family unit so special. It’s a book deeply committed to the superhero genre, but a very particular, special corner of it – Imaginauts understands that only the Fantastic Four feels like this.
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