Fantastic Four #9 Review

Written by: Ryan North
Art by: Ivan Fiorelli
Colors by: Jesus Aburtov
Letters by: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover art by: Alex Ross
Cover price: $3.99
Release date: July 5th, 2023

Fantastic Four #9 concludes the fight against Xargorr, the mind-controlling alien determined to enslave the human race.

Is It Good?

Fantastic Four #9 is an enigma. How can a big action battle between the FF and a powerful alien with telepathic powers be so big and bombastic while at the same time being so nonsensical and boring? You have to give Ryan North credit for crafting a comic that stands apart from everything else Marvel puts out, but standing apart for the wrong reasons isn’t positive.

When last we left the FF, Reed and Ben were under the mind control of Xargorr. Ben and Reed were ordered to attack Sue, Alicia, and Johnny to end the issue in a cliffhanger. Now, Alicia leads the charge to save the day with her powers of sculpting and imagination.

If that premise sounds weird to you, that’s because it is weird, and it’s weirder when you see it in action. In the previous issue, Ryan North made an oddly out-of-place show of forcing Sue and Johnny together to practice making compatible shapes with their respective powers. In an awkward fashion, the brother/sister team put that practice to use (not quite exactly, but close enough, I guess) when Alicia directs Sue to make her a malleable force field to sculpt a creation Sue would copy in a much bigger size to fight off Reed and Ben.

On the one hand, fighting Reed and Ben with a gigantic octopus made of Sue’s force field power sounds like a cool concept. It’s a bit of a stretch (no pun intended), but it could be cool. But all this creative development supposedly happens in the course of a few seconds while Ben and Reed are actively attacking the group. Skilled or not, no sculptor is going to dream up, craft, and articulate a fully-realized octopus within the span of a few seconds. The idea is cool, but the execution within the context of the fight is nonsense.

It gets worse when North, speaking through Alicia and Xargorr, delivers a painfully detailed and slow stream of narration about what it means to be blind, what it means to be a human, and redundant narration of the action on the page. If you find another way to create Sue’s constructs and pare back the narration/expository dialog by half, this would be a fun comic. But again, North tries to make simple ideas overly profound and misses the mark.

Regarding the art, it’s very good the great. Fiorelli flexes creative muscle with Sue’s constructs and the battle action, so if you want eye-popping splash pages of superhero action, you get it. Visually, this is an engaging comic.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Bits and Pieces

In Fantastic Four #9, Ryan North continues to be his own worst enemy by taking simple fights and simple ideas and making them more complicated than they need to be in an effort to make this comic needlessly profound. The art looks great, and the action reflects the kind of big battle excitement you want in an FF comic, but the issue is weighed down by silly execution and ponderous pacing.