Sunday, December 29, 2019

"The End" Week: Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four #48!


A sad goodbye this issue, but not just because it was the final issue: from 2009, Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #48, "Moving Day" Written by Paul Tobin, art by Denis Medri, colors by Sotocolor.

Tobin does something you might not see in some other writers' entire run with the team: shows them having fun, and wanting to be around each other. It might not be as dramatic, but it's nice. Meanwhile, at the end of time, Galactus makes a call, to the present day FF. He hates to lower himself to asking for help, but he needs assistance...moving.

Billions of years in the future, the universe is collapsing and will end soon. Galactus will once again be pushing through to the next universe, after the next big bang: he was originally from the universe before this one, so he knew he could do it; but a cult called Black End wanted to stop him. Their argument was if the universe is ending, everything should die; Galactus believed they were just being babies because they were going to die. Since Black End includes Annihilus, a four-armed thing that stole the Silver Surfer's powers, the Supreme Intelligence, and one of Thanos's kids; they probably are being dicks about it. Galactus offers to feed the team power for the fight, and Sue extracts a promise from him: next universe, only eat uninhabited planets.

The fight with Black End goes okay, but not great: they don't have a counter to the Supreme Intelligence's mental attacks, and supercharging Reed's powers just makes them hard to control. The FF is forced to retreat to Galactus, who simply teleports what's left of Black End to their homes, where the universe will end for them soon enough. The team realizes Galactus could've done that at any time and didn't need them at all, but Reed is the first to realize why Galactus brought them there: he was lonely. Galactus hadn't been super-popular in this universe, and it would be billions of years before any life to talk to evolves in the next one. It's understandable that he might want to see the closest thing he has to friends before that; and Reed tells Galactus he will miss him too, before returning home. (Before you suggest, what about Galactus's heralds? I'd say even the best of them, he still kept a boss/employee relationship...)

This was the last issue of this series, although Fantastic Four Giant-Size Adventures would come next month. Tobin was going to Marvel Adventures Spider-Man (with #53), which would be a bit of restructure for that book: instead of one-and-done adventures, there would be a bit more continuity for young Spidey's adventures, featuring Emma Frost as a recurring guest-star.

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