Fantastic Two
We've got ourselves a little bit of a partnership here as Spider-Man and The Human Torch team up to hunt themselves a painting stealing fox. What follows is an adventure that relies far too heavily on luck and a very odd use of Spider-Man’s spidey sense which makes the plot a bit of a non starter. That said the bringing together of Spider-Man and Johnny Storm gives us some wonderful back and forth dialogue.
The dialogue is slightly more fiery, if you’ll pardon the pun, than the normal back and forth between The Thing and Johnny and it is something really wonderful to behold. It really propels you through the comic, and from the moment our two heroes meet all the way through to the end of the book we move at a wonderful breakneck pace. The hunt for the fox is fairly poorly plotted, they kind of move from point to point lucking into three of the foxes hideouts before finally facing off against him for the final fight. Also The Fox pre-emptively attacks Spider-Man in a wonderful moment of idiocy as there really was no reason for him to not just leave town. I’m going to give The Fox a 0/2 as he lacks any meaningful threat to heroes (beyond a brief smear campaign) and his character (he’s a crook) is very uninteresting
The art of this book is fine. Ditko manages to make Spider-Man and Human Torch look pretty great and the couple of scraps they have against one and other are really well laid out and drawn. Other than that we get quite a few blank backgrounds throughout which is always a little disappointing to me. Look I loved the spider signal on the Statue of Liberty’s torch, but beyond these few panels there isn't a lot to get excited about here. The cover suffers for the grayscale background and the poses of the two heroes just aren't great.
I feel like this book makes good on the special cross over of its two heroes, but the staff used this as a crutch in lieu of an interesting story. With a compelling story and a decent villain this could have been something special. As it is it’s much more of a question of what could have been. This is enjoyable while never reaching it’s full potential, still the pages go by quickly and there are much worse ways to spend your time.
Only Spider-Man Would Think Of Shining His Spider Symbol From The Statue Of Liberty’s Torch!
The Human Torch
