The Micro-World of Doctor Doom!
A bit of a nutty adventure this month, when The Fantastic Four descend into the mad micro-world of Doctor Doom. In adhering to the continuity addressed quite a while back when we last seen the mad doctor shrinking into apparent nothingness, the re-emergence of Doom is well told and continues to develop his character naturally. It's a bit of a slow-starter in terms of plot, yet the first half of the comic which deals almost exclusively with characterisation of the Four (an extra-long slice of drama this month as this is technically Marvel's first two-parter of the Silver Age and so everything is doubled up) is nicely written and told with a light tone that echoes the last issue in which Doom showed up; specifically in the panels involving Ben Grimm.
Ant-Man and The Wasp show up briefly too, making it the third time characters have crossed over to different books (The Hulk and Spider-Man being the first two), though their appearance isn't all that significant. On the slightly rougher side of town we have the perfunctory Invisible Girl Is Taken Hostage subplot, and the overall bananas of this apparent tiny-invisible world that lies in the microscopic. It's an interesting, somewhat imaginative concept, but is dealt with a little silly when we learn that there's an entire civilization at work down here. But all in all, it's a pretty good read, despite some minor flaws in the repetitive writing that drags it down a little.
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