Fantastic Four #10 Review

Written by: Ryan North, Jonathan Hickman
Art by: Leandro Fernandez
Colors by: Jesus Aburtov
Letters by: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover art by: Alex Ross
Cover price: $3.99
Release date: August 2, 2023

Fantastic Four #10 follows the Vruzeox refugees as they make the long trek to a new world after their star collapsed. Unfortunately, their hypersleep keeps getting interrupted every century by strange-looking beings.

Is It Good?

In the course of Ryan North’s run, Fantastic Four #10 is the most sci-fi-ish story to come along where North plays with the concept of “relative time” and how it can make the same event feel very different, depending on your point of view.

North’s script is almost exclusively told from the perspective of the Vruzeox people. The star of their homeworld collapsed, so the survivors are forced to leave home to recolonize a new world thousands of years worth of travel away. To make the trip possible, all but one person at a time is placed in hypersleep, leaving a single person to mind the ship. When the pilot reaches old age, the next pilot is revived to take over.

During their long flight, the stars suddenly go dark, and the pilot notices a flaming individual just outside the ship’s hull, but the flaming individual appears motionless. Over the centuries, the succession of pilots notice, in turn, each member of the Fantastic Four without knowing who they are or what they’re after. Eventually, the problem and solution become clear.

If you’re a sci-fi fan. and the setup sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been done before on television, ala Star Trek: Voyager (S6E12, “Blink of an Eye”) and film ala Interstellar (2014). At the risk of sounding picky, North sort of gets the effect right but not the reason behind it (high spin due to a large gravity differential). However, you come for the coolness of it, so it’s fine as long as you ignore the attempt at science.

Consistent with the rest of Ryan North’s run, Fantastic Four #10 is a bottle issue. It doesn’t connect with anything that came before, and it doesn’t lead to something else later. It’s a one-shot, so you can take or leave it as you see fit.

Is it a great Fantastic Four story? Considering most of the story is told from the Vrazeox point of view, the FF are barely in it. At best, Fantastic Four #10 is a mildly interesting sci-fi story, but the presence of the FF is almost incidental. You could swap in any hero or hero team, and it wouldn’t make much difference.

How’s the art? Leandro Fernandez’s art style is fine for the story presented. There’s almost no action, only the occasionally cool visuals such as Sue Storm changing from invisible to visible in slow motion. Fernandez has to make a dialog/narration-heavy comic look interesting through alien imagery, and he largely succeeds.

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

Fantastic Four #10 borrows a classic sci-fi idea to tell a one-shot about aliens stuck in time and space while strange visitors move at a very slow rate of speed. The sci-fi concept (relative time) creates an interesting drama, and the art team gets the job done.