Fantastic Four (2018-) #21 by Dan Slott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I dropped FF a while back to make room for all the new X-Men books, but I picked this up because it’s an Empyre tie-in and I wanted to follow the story of the Skrull and Kree kids the FF picked up in Empyre: Fantastic Four #0.
This issue picks up their story after Reed and Sue ask Franlkin and Val to take them back to Earth while they deal with the Kree/Skrull fleet in orbit. I like Franklin and Val, and the two new kids, so I was happy to see that plot thread hadn’t just been dropped.
The kids prove too much to handle and so Val recruits Spider-Man and Wolverine as back up, but Wolverine sniffs that one of the kids, who’s transformed into a tiger, is a Skrull and so runs her through with his claws…and…sigh…I hate that |Wolverine is so often used by non-X-Men writers (and, to be fair, some X-Men writers) as an unthinking murderer. This is sloppy writing by Slott and could have been handled much better. There’s no reason why, if he needed the Skrull girl to be mortally wounded, that she couldn’t just have been harmed in the confusion of the battle.
“Oh no, I didn’t realise it was a kid!” So what? Just running your claws through an enemy wouldn’t be any more acceptable if they were an adult. And, you know, Logan has years of experience, years of keeping his animal tendencies and berserker rage under tight control…because if he doesn’t then people get hurt.
This wasn’t a bad comic, really, but that one point really spoiled it for me. It feels like Wolverine was thrown in here so that he could be front and centre on the cover of a comic that was already going to get a sales boost from being an Empyre tie-in, and then he was badly handled.
The art, however, is lovely, and is what’s kept me from giving this a lower score.
Random Ramblings Of A Ragamuffin 