The Floundering Four
I love how FF has it's own unique tone compared to the companion series, Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four has a nice focus on the core family, with a slightly more serious tilt, and FF has a looser connected group, still a lot of character development in sight, but a lot more quirks and comedy. I think that's why I enjoy FF more than Fantastic Four, I know Fraction is amazing at balancing quirky art, comedy, and seriousness like on his AMAZING Hawkeye series. I really love the characters.... or at least I do now. I really don't know how much I cared about Ant-Man or She-Hulk before this, but I'm definitely interested in the whole team here.
This issue isn't so much about the Future Foundation as it is the core replacement Fantastic Four. We get to see how they adjust in the face of the uncertain future we all saw coming, and slowly we're learning who they are, and what their struggles are as they join in with what is amazingly something closer to a normal life than most of them know. There's a lot of excellent comedy stemming from the quirks or backgrounds of the offbeat members of the replacement team. You really begin to feel something for all of them, they're in over their heads, but it also could be exactly what all of them need.
This issue gives us the first big battle of either Marvel Now FF/Fantastic Four series, and though it's not a world ending threat, it's a brilliant mirror of the Fantastic Four's past and a great chance to see the new team in action. It's entertaining on a wide range of levels in how everything goes wrong. There's a definite comedy to it, like Hawkeye on a true superhero level, as Medusa comes swooping into battle in her nightgown and Darla barely knows what to do. But at the same time, this chaotic disaster holds a kind of deeper tragedy to it, as the world is so quick to come crashing down on these heroes who have stood up to fill a void, stood up as heroes. The world is a cruel place.
In Conclusion: 4.55/5
The pacing was a little off at times, I had a hard time following a small handful of scenes. And there was a sense that some of the events were just a bit rushed, but overall there was so much to love about this issue, and then the final cliffhanger was just so ridiculously bizarre I can't even begin to fathom the next issue that excites the hell out of me.