Negative Zone madness! Johnny Storm ventures into the negative zone. I haven't picked up a F4 book in quite some time, and I know I've missed out on a lot of stuff, but luckily, Marvel has those sweet catch-up pages to let me know what I've missed out on since the last time I truly read a F4 book, when Human Torch was a herald of Galactus, during Disassembled.
The Good
I enjoyed some of the more action-orientated splash panels in this issue, Hickman's writing is usually pretty strong, but I felt it fell a little flat here. If anything, the art was stronger than the writing here. I really like how Dale Eaglesham drew Human Torch as he was in "flame on" mode. His designs of the aliens in the negative zones were also pretty cool, they all had the same type of coloring to them, so you could tell they were from the same planet, or dimension for this case. A few panels of imagery I really liked, one time involving the aliens mentioned above, and the other time involved the Human Torch.
The Bad
I just didn't care about the story. Maybe I don't understand the multitude of the things happening in here, which I believe I do, but the story just seemed a little beige to me. It's not an awful issue, the talent is there on both the writing and art sides. The book was just ok. One thing I didn't like at all was a full page of the screen of the Fantastic Four's "homepad." (iPad) I thought it was an advertisement, so I skipped it. I realized on the next page that I needed to go back, only to realize that the information on said "homepad" was vital to the story.
The Verdict
I couldn't have cared less about what was going on in this book. It's right down the middle for me. I didn't like it, and I didn't hate it. It's just "meh."
