Maximum Fantastic Four [Hardcover]

"Maximum Fantastic Four" is an interesting idea concocted by the famed author Walter Mosley (yes, the guy who writes the Easy Rawlins books).

It's a large format reprint volume of FF #1, with only a panel (at most two) a page. Sometimes the panel spreads across two pages, and in a few instances, a huge gatefold is necessary.

The reproductions are pristine, and the colors feel just right.

In doing so, Mr. Mosley has discovered what made comics magical when you were little. No matter how much you love comics now...it's not the same as when you were little. Didn't they seem BIGGER back then? Not in size, but in scope. Comics were definitely widescreen in a pan-and-scan world.
He noticed that in re-reading his beloved early FF issues, they didn't have the same majesty to them, the same bigness. So he scanned the first issue into his computer, which enabled him to ponder each frame at a time. It slowed him down. And the magic came back.
He is so right. I don't know about you, but now I read too fast, and I sort of read a page at a time. But I didn't use to.
In reprinting the book in this fashion, he forces us to read like a child again. Every panel was a scene in a movie. They were nearly three-dimensional. Panoramic.

Widescreen.

After reading through the book, as well as reading the essays and stuff from Mosley and Mark Evanier, it became so perfectly obvious, so painfully clear. He identified the precise difference between reading comics when you're young, and reading comics when you're old.

And you will spiral dizzyingly back to your childhood reading this book this way...I had a terrific time.

I think this book will work best for those who came of "comic age" during the Silver Age...60's to 70's. I think older, Golden Age fans won't get the same rush, and the relatively sophisticated children of the 80s...of the Dark Knight and Watchmen era ...may not have had experienced that simple wide-eyed wonder that we did.

The one reason I don't give this five stars is that with all the fancy-shmancy "design elements" put into this book, whenever a panel crosses the midline, you lose a big part of it as it dives in towards the binding. Also, some panels actually have parts missing, including some words/lines.

Nevertheless, that's trivial compared to the gasp you'll release when you open the final gatefold...

...MAN that was cool!

The first time I had the opportunity to read the first issue of the Fantastic Four was in the Pocket Books collection published in the late 1970s. Despite being shrunk to the size of paperback page, the comic still brimmed with excitement and energy and I still think fondly of that book. Reading the Maximum Fantastic Four was a very different experience. Reading is probably the wrong verb though because I didn't find Maximum Fantastic Four to be conducive to actually reading. Instead, the audience is expected to absorb the combination of image and text as if it were a static painting or advertising image.

As Walter Mosely indicates, the experience allows to you concentrate on the design - layout, color, penciling, and to a certain extent pacing - of the book. Some of the panels certainly gain added gravitas when they are separated from the story and allowed to stand on their own. Panels are given their own page or double page spreads.

Unfortunately, I found the overall experience disappointing. Some panels are cropped in such a way that text is cut from the image. I found it annoying to have pieces of the picture tantalizingly out of reach, even it was text. In addition, some panels are placed in such a way that the gutter runs through their middle. There is little gutter loss but the book didn't lie flat if you were near the beginning or end. A slight bump lifted one side and would disrupt the image. The problem would not have occurred if these panels were centered on a separate page and it is not clear why they weren't given separate pages to begin with.

Walter Mosely discusses how this project began when he enlarged panels scanned from his own copy of Fantastic Four. I certainly shared his enjoyment in select instances. I thought Reed and Johnny's fall in the Mole Man's depths was fantastic (no pun intended) as were the first appearance of the Mole Man, the Diamond Valley and the comedy of Sue Storm trying to pay the taxi driver. That said, there were a few times where the change in size affected the quality of the linework. Maybe I'm sensitive but, in my humble opinion, the linework looked crisper and more powerful when it didn't fill the whole page. My eye seemed to prefer a lower ratio and so I felt some images didn't benefit when they maximized enlargement.

The essays by Mosely and Evanier were good. Evanier's examination of the mystery of who worked on Fantastic Four #1, including the unknown inker and whether Lee gave Kirby a typed script, seemed thoroughly researched. I've seen much of this speculation and detective work in piecemeal articles from other magazines, notably Roy Thomas' ALTER EGO. Mosely's thoughts on Maximum Fantastic Four were fine, but, again, I don't find myself as enraptured with the maximization of Kirby's art as did Mosely. His thoughts do provide a valuable prism via which you should approach the book.

Much care and thought was put into producing this book and so I give credit to everyone who worked on it. I think this project overreaches its abilities though. I won't go so far as to denigrate it because it does accomplish its goals on occasion. Unfortunately, it doesn't satisfy me completely for the reasons stated. This book could be a revelatory experience for some readers and I wish those readers well.

The one star I gave Maximum FF is if I had paid the full $49.99 price tag. Others have hinted at this book's major flaw, and it's one I just can't get around: the paneling. Yeah, enlarged is gorgeous, but for some reason they were incapable of fitting whole panels on one single page, and in other cases, a smaller panel is placed right in the center of two pages, surrounded by an ocean of white space. Why? It could have easily fit on one single page. On other panels dialogue is cut off, parts of the pictures are missing, and for no reason I can tell. The layout seems haphazard and lazy, which makes no sense compared with the ambition of this book.

Now, if you pay $9.99 (plus the $3.99 shipping) like I did, then this book easily gets four, maybe even five stars. It really is beautiful. The paper, the colors, the essays, and of course Jack Kirby's art. The dustjacket folds out into a GIANT reproduction of the cover of FF #1. Just plain cool. If they could find a way to blow up panels to fill one over-sized page at a time, I could see a new niche in comic collecting by reproducing some of comicdom's best in this format. This is a really cool idea, and I thank Walter Mosley for dreaming it and Marvel for approving it.

But PLEASE. Don't spend $50 on this, unless you have too much money lying around. I know MY wife would've killed me.

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