Fantastic Four #14 is a return to form with the Grimm-Masters children solving the possible world-ending crisis with a bit of luck, mathematics understanding, and an end-of-issue reveal that makes you want to reread the issue.
Ryan North’s Fantastic Four is so uniquely equipped to tackle big, world-ending events that read smaller with the focus on a select few characters. Especially in the case of this week’s issue: leaving Jo Venn and N’kalla Grimm Masters to solve the fate of the world alone.
What’s meant to be a nice family dinner quickly turns sour when all five adults are pulled from the table, each going to retrieve the prior members who left to collect Reed from his lab. None of them come back up to the table, so the kids take it upon themselves to go investigate. Everyone is in the thrall of Reed’s computer screen, with Alicia’s hand on a tactile tablet to feed her whatever is causing this strange reaction. Cue Franklin and Valeria also hypnotized by the screens, leaving Jo and Nicki to fend for themselves.
Marvel
The two alien teens make the unsavory discovery that these numbers have enraptured people all over the world, stalling out internet and real-world traffic to a total standstill. It’s a set of numbers within pi, aka 3.14159 and so on, but these particular numbers have broken the human race. They happen upon Iron Man, and try to break him from the trance. That ends in Tony entering an enraged state until he can find a new screen with the numbers to enrapture him again.
Things take a further turn for the worse when the teens realize when the power goes out, people will continue to attack each other.
Whenever the world’s been in crisis previously, the Grimm-Masters kids have always had Val and Franklin, two seasoned teen problem-solvers and heroes in their own right. Now, Jo and Nikki have to work off of their own understanding of the world and think how their family would to break the worldwide trance.
There’s a fun flashback to the First Family on a hiking trip and Reed explains how poison ivy uniquely attacks humans based on its own evolution. This leads the kids to understand they weren’t harmed by the deepest numbers of PI displayed on-screen because of their alien genetics.
After a few clever calls to both Skrull and Kree scientists (let’s not imagine that intergalactic phone bill), Jo and Nicki have a plan to change the base metric system of human numbering. This is when it’s revealed that humans have twelve fingers instead of ten, they alter the evolution of humanity to instead have ten fingers and stop the email correspondence Reed received from ever containing that particular message from PI.
Marvel
Perhaps some of the trickiest parts of writing something like the Fantastic Four, who have such an expansive roster and history, is putting focus on characters that haven’t seen too much of the limelight. Especially with newer characters like Ben and Alicia’s adoptive alien children, two characters I’ve struggled to enjoy because I don’t really know them beyond being loved by the First Family.
Setting them off on their own solo adventure to solve a world-ending catastrophe did let their personalities shine through and show what they’ve learned in their time with the First Family, including deciding to solve the problem on their own, resolute in their plan to save the day.
Ramon Rosanas’s pencils present such an eerie feeling to Jo and Nicki’s exploration of the streets below, showing how empty and lifeless it feels with everyone connected to their screens. With Rosanas’s art and Edgar Delgado’s colors, each page strikes the right tone and pitch of this one-and-done Fantastic Four story.
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