Writer: Dan Slott

Art: Sean Izaakse, Marcio Menyz & Erick Arciniega

Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 19th, 2020

Fantastic Four #19 concludes the Point of Origin arc that has been a treat for the last few months and I’ve got to give it to Dan Slott, he’s managed to finish it on a stronger note than I had expected. Endings are difficult to do, I don’t know if you do much writing but they really are. The pace drops, the post-final conflict reader fatigue sets in, and your brain just sort of shunts into blah blah blah The End mode.

But not here, at least not right away. Sean Izaakse, Marcio Menyz & Erick Arciniega give me something that I have wanted to witness for the longest damned time. And Slott wrote it to be beautifully cathartic so that it doesn’t feel out of character for Reed to lose his temper and go full ham in a most personal way to a character in this book. The artwork, actually, is the strongest side of this conclusion personally speaking. The lush fantastical imagery of the world of Spyre still gives me goosebumps. This fractured world of gods and monsters, living in isolationist and xenophobic fear of EVERYTHING, not Spyre is a backdrop that almost perfectly reflects the generational gap in society today.

However, the writing becomes almost saccharine as the book progresses. The Four are a little too nice, a little too willing to forgive the crimes committed against them. I suppose that’s part of what makes them fantastic though. It’s also what makes them a little too perfect to be believable people, aside from the whole Invisible rubber rock fire thing, but yeah, they just seem a bit too easily coddled. Did the past six issues not happen? Is part of the effect the cosmic rays had on them a dreadful short term memory?

Final Thoughts

I wish this was a stronger conclusion, I really do. But it was honestly filler with pretty artwork between two bookend sequences that have the possibility to be the start of something interesting. And do you want to know the worst thing about it all? I’m not mad.
I’m disappointed.