Fantastic Four #15 Review

I mentioned earlier this week how excited I was for Fantastic Four #15. The issue celebrates the 65th anniversary of The Fantastic Four. As the solicits for the issue describe it, the comic features:

an extra-large, extra-fantastic adventure […] starring everyone's favorite adventurers, spanning centuries of history and a universe of scientific progress! The Fantastic Four have been defeated: with their personal arrows of time reversed, they're careening into the past with no hope of salvation - unless a complete stranger can find out what they need.

It’s a tricky thing to setup—a story that is original and also reflecting on the past. Many retrospective tales like this fail. This comic manages to pull it off, using time travel as a clever hook for the Fantastic Four to bear witness to their own adventures.

The opening chapter sets it all up, as the team jumps through time continuing to bump into the same stranger. That stranger becomes a stand in for us, the readers who have met the Fantastic Four ourselves, at all the different points in our lives, often when we need them the most. It’s a beautiful opening and reminds us all of the power of these stories.

I am grateful to have met the Fantastic Four, too, and I agree: what a fantastic life, indeed.