Fear Itself: Fearsome Four 1

Fear Itself is the latest Marvel “event”.  Cue some world-threatening force that causes heroes to band together and save the day via numerous crossovers and miniseries. Yawn yawn yawn. Maybe Marvel’s saving all its creative efforts for its movie spinoffs, because there’s little sign of any such inspiration in its comics line at the moment.

You know you’re in for a bad time when the précis reads like this: “The mysterious serpent has been released from entombment at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He has summoned the Worthy with seven hammers that fell from the heavens across the globe. They are unstoppable engines of destruction called to rampage in the Serpent’s name.”

That’s as clear as mud, then.

Anyway, it appears the world’s gone all fearful , and the Man-Thing has gone on a rampage, feeding on that fear.  He encounters four characters that Marvel clearly have no idea what to do with:  Frankenstein’s Monster, She-Hulk, Howard the Duck and Nighthawk.  To hell with logic, let’s turn them into a team!  Perhaps it’s some sort of corporate revenge on the late Steve Gerber, since three of the characters are most closely associated with his work.

Writer Brandon Montclare does the best that he can with this ridiculous premise.  There’s an effective though entirely illogical opening scene where the Man-Thing surprises two furtive lovers on a park bench (would you feel a  city being torn apart by a rampaging monster, in which crashing cars and uprooted street lights and screaming crowds must be clearly be audible,  is the best location for a romantic get-together?).  That’s about as good as it gets.

There’s a muddy plot in which Howard and She-Hulk are already paired up, and they chance upon Nighthawk and Frankenstein’s Monster. All the characters have had a personality transplant. Nighthawk has turned all dark and psychopathic, a situation brought on by an identity crisis. She-Hulk is…a bit of a nothing, really, though a model of complexity in comparison to Frankenstein’s Monster whose only defining feature seems to be that he wants to be left alone.  Howard acts and speaks like a character from a hard-boiled crime novel. Worse, he resembles a midget wearing a duck mask. That’ll be in preparation for the film adaption, then.

This is finely drawn by three artists with very disparate styles. Kaluta gets the dark, brooding scenes, which are illustrated in vintage Kaluta pulp deco style.  Bodenheim draws on a clear, pleasing mainstream superhero template. Bisley’s contribution resembles a PCP-crazed Corben. It’s better than the script and overall conception deserves, but the overall effect is terribly incoherent, with dreadful continuity between the individual scenes (most notably Bisley’s Howard, who reverts back to the classic Gerber character, complete with an entirely different wardrobe).

This could have been fun, in an eccentric, off-the-wall fashion.  Instead, it’s a waste of several characters I remember fondly, and I wonder what the point was, if there was a point, beyond creating another corporate franchise.  Worse, it’s a waste of the considerable skills of its artists. I wish they’d seen fit to employ them elsewhere, because this, sadly, is yet another run-of-the mill comic book.