Fantastic Four 4, Scarlet Spider 14

Fantastic Four 4
Fraction (w) and Bagley and Farmer (a) and Mounts, Delgado and Beredo (c)

I give a lot of crap to Reed Richards. Like most people, I tend to find him boring. The character traits that I like best about him tend to be the kind of hypotheticals (the ego that makes him name himself Mr. Fantastic, the fact the like, 90% of the alternate universe Reed Richards we see are evil, etc.) that I can't prove with my knowledge of comics. It's why Fantastic Four has never really appealed to me; I like the idea of a family of superheroes (I love, for instance, The Incredibles), with all the problems that brings with it, and I rather like Sue and Johnny. Reed kind of cuts all that off (well, Reed and Thing, but I'll get to that in a second). It's issues like this that make Reed human to me. I like the idea of this series as a whole as it pertains to Reed; he picks up his family and demands they go explore again so he can secretly find a cure to save them. I think that all fits and it raises interesting questions about him as a character. We're going to get into a little bit of that soon, as it seems like he's going to reveal to Sue why they're really out in space now. But in an issue like this one, we see really human and genuinely nice moments from Reed.

This issue is framed as a letter to Sue from Reed, one he'll never actually give to her. It describes how much he loves her and how hard it is to be away from her. It's easy to characterize their marriage as an absentee husband and his wife who resents it but has grown somewhat accustomed because she loves him. Issues like this one go a long way to erase that. Here Reed makes a display of his immense love for Sue, one that she'll never knew he made and that goes beyond the bounds of everything his scientific mind stands for, simply to make it. Simply because he loves her that much and he wants an entire race to understand it. SPOILERS: he uses his time machine to paint a portrait of his family, with Sue as the centerpiece, in a cave fundamental to a civilization's development. When the F4 go there and meet this civilization, they hail Sue as a queen, almost as a goddess. It's how Reed sees her and it's...well, it's a little bit adorable.

Fraction has done a fantastic job already making me look at these characters in a new light. He has made tremendous steps with Reed and he clearly has plans for Thing, who spends much of his time in space with the family set apart. He's removed himself. It goes back to what I've said here before about writers trying to make Thing interesting by giving him the weight of being a monster, as they did in Fear Itself. I said then that it was too drastic a change to only show it in one event and ignore it again after (yes, I'm aware that mentality has always been tied to him, but it's faded so much in recent years). Well Fraction wrote Fear Itself and now here he is again, plugging away at Thing. Now it might just work. With that base in Fear Itself, Fraction can develop a deeper Thing through a much expanded series. It's exciting. Which is something I never thought I'd say about Fantastic Four.

Scarlet Spider 14
Yost (w) and Pham, Palmer, Pallot, Bit, Wong and Kessel (a) and Fabela (c)

Scarlet Spider, right now, is running pretty parallel to Venom in a couple different ways. There's a guy with a troubled past running around in a spider-based costume with spider-based powers (YES, Venom's are symbiote-based but he manifests them as a spider so WHATEVER) and something inside him is warping him to reveal his true nature. With Flash, the mystery is a little different, revolving more around the mystery of what demon it is that's causing all this. With Kaine, the demon is very much himself and tied to the spider-lore that Spider-Man built in either in the 90s or 00s. There's an idea that Spider-Man became Spider-Man not out of a fluke accident, but because he was chosen by "The Weaver" or "The Great Spider" or something. I don't love it because Spidey's initial appeal was that he was an everyman. He was every awkward high schooler who could have something magical happen to him just because he was in the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time, if you think this is a curse). Now it was never in his hands, fate was always going to choose Peter Parker. I don't love it, but it exists so it makes sense to go back to. I do like the way Yost ties it in here, too. Peter has rejected the Spider in favor of the Man. Kaine didn't do that previously, more or less. That's his brutality and his anger. In recent days, he's tried to amend for all of that but, as his situation is more dire, the Spider is willing to save him if he commits to that aspect of himself, choosing the Spider instead of the Man.

This way, it's pretty interesting. It's also interesting because Kaine says no at first and fights the Spider. He admits that he'd rather die than give in to the monster, even though it's his nature to be the monster. However, he feels the need to protect Aracely and the only way to do that is to accept. Eventually he does and he is reborn as a horrible spider being, more spider than man. Meanwhile, Aracely leads the two werewolves into a gang's turf and gets them caught up there. She's got dark little secrets, that one. The werewolves keep bringing it up and getting us to ask questions about it. They do reveal some more in this issue about those secrets, but we don't know the full extent of them. Stuff worth looking out for, on top of the goings-on with Kaine.