MARVEL EPIC COLLECTION : FANTASTIC FOUR (collectif)

[Le_Doc]

MARVEL EPIC COLLECTION : FANTASTIC FOUR – LES NOUVEAUX FANTASTIQUES

Walt Simonson, Tom DeFalco, Arthur Adams, Paul Ryan I 496 pages, 30,00 € (édition régulière), 34,00 € (édition collector)

Lorsqu’une fugitive skrull fait croire à la mort des Quatre Fantastiques, Spider-Man, Hulk, Ghost Rider et Wolverine décident de former une nouvelle version du groupe aussi étrange qu’inattendue. Avec aussi le retour fracassant du Docteur Fatalis.

(Contient les épisodes US Fantastic Four (1961) 347-361 et Annual 24, et Marvel Holiday Special (1991) 1 (partiel), précédemment publiés dans SPIDER-MAN & LES HÉROS MARVEL 5, Nova 173-183 et inédits)

SORTIE LE 12 AVRIL

[soyouz (FC powaaaa)]

@Le_Doc

dans le petit format de Nova dans les années 90 !

Sûr que ça date de la période petit format ?

[Le_Doc]

C’est sûr. Nova format comics, c’est à partir du 193 (et donc F.F. #371).

[soyouz (FC powaaaa)]

Ah ouais. Merci pour la confirmation.

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

[prunes]

Je ne connais pas, un avis? Un indispensable? Un très bon comic?Un bon comic?

Merci d’avance

(j’ai fait une petite recherche vo, j’ai trouvé un sujet mais tellement vaste que j’ai abandonné)

[n.n.nemo]

Indispensable non.

Du bon adams et une idée loufoque plus proche de la pochade (et si les persos les plus vendeurs et violents devenaient les ff)

Sa place est à l interieur du run de simonson, en disgression de qualité, plutot que d en etre extrait.

Les revivals episodiques depuis n ont pas d autres intérêts que le clin d’œil.

Les episodes de defalco ne sont pas mauvais mais s inscrivent surtout dans son run et y sont importants mais ont donc peu de pertinence sans les episodes d avant et d après.

[soyouz (FC powaaaa)]

Je pense que la question est sur les 496 pages, pas que sur l’arc avec Adams.

[Marko]

@prunes

Un indispensable?

Le #350 & le #352.

@prunes

Un très bon comic?

L’arc avec Art Adams comme invité prestigieux.

@prunes

Un bon comic?

Les derniers numéros du run de Simonson (avec le train à la Retour vers le Futur 3).

@n.n.nemo

Indispensable non.

Ou alors pour les fans de Fatalis (même si ce relooking n’a pas duré longtemps).

@n.n.nemo

proche de la pochade

C’était le but (affiché en haut des couvertures).

@Marko

Tom DeFalco : I know it was only for the one story, but you then replaced the entire Fantastic Four ! What inspired you to change things around so drastically ?

Walt Simonson : Well, that’s funny. Actually, I just read a thing online where (writer) Kurt Busiek gives his version of what happened. Kurt was involved, too, see, and what’s interesting is that his recollections and mine are not quite the same. I mean, they’re not too far off and it’s cool, but I’ll give you my version.

The way I remember it, I was running late, and I wanted to get some fill-in issues done to help me catch up. It was really a fool’s dream, because you think you’re going to use that time to play catch-up, but it never happens. But it was my honourable intention at the time. Art Adams was and is a good friend, and a phenomenal artist to boot, so I asked him if he’d be game to do a three-part FF story, and he agreed. Around the time this was happening, Spider-Man was very hot, and I thought it would be kind of fun to guest-star Spidey in the book. That was how it started.

At some point, I went down to Carol Kalish’s office on the tenth floor. I knew and liked Carol a lot. I thought she was really sharp. Every so often I just wandered into her office and kept her from doing any work by talking to her. I’d like to find out what was going on in the biz and get her perspective on it, because it was a different perspective to mine.
An oral history of Carol Kalish: the most important comic book figure you've never heard of | GamesRadar+
So I was talking to Kurt and Carol ; I don’t remember who else, thought there were two or three people sitting around, shooting the breeze. I told Carol that I was thinking about getting Spider-Man into Fantastic Four, and Kurt was like, « Well, if you’re gonna use Spider-Man, you’re gonna have to use Ghost Rider, the Punisher and Wolverine », because at that time, those were all the hot characters - and we all cracked up.

Now, my memory is that it was said pretty much in jest, but I went home that night, and I felt like Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live - « Spider-Man, yeah, Wolverine, yeah, that’s the ticket ». So I called Art (Adams) up and I said, « How about if we use these guys ? »

Art said, « Well, I don’t like the Punisher - I liked him when he was a vilain, but I don’t like him as a hero », and I said, « So who do you want to draw ? » Arthur replied « I’d love to draw the Hulk. »

So then I had Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Wolverine and the Hulk and at some point after we had arrived at those four, I thought, « Wait a minute, we’ve got four guys : the Hulk’s kinda like the Thing, Ghost Rider’s kind of got like a flaming head like the Torch. Spidey’s a science geek like Reed. » However, wether we were gonna make Wolverine into Sue or not… well, I’m not gonna go there.

There was a certain amount of lightweight correspondence, and the light bulb went off. I had four characters, and there was some correspondence - perfect ! So the idea that we were doing a new FF was the very last thing I thought of for that story.

So my recollection is that Kurt suggested some of the characters and Arthur suggested the Hulk. It was a team effort. Anyway, I asked Art - as I always do when I’m writing for another artist - « What do you want to draw ? » In Arthur’s case, it was like, « How about the Hulk on a motorcycle ? » Okay. Well, we’ve got him on a flying motorcycle, but nevertheless, it’s a motorcycle. He also wanted to draw a bunch of the old Marvel monsters ; the old 50’s Atlas stuff - he loves that kind of creature-feature thing, he’s very familiar with it. He wanted to do the Mole Man. I worked out the Mole Man hadn’t been around in a while, so that was cool. Those were the only elements I remember, there may have been other stuff, I don’t know…

Skrulls.

That might have been Art’s idea, too. I just don’t remember. But somewhere in there, I’d take all these things that Art handed me and say, « Okay, now I’m going to find a story. » I started digging around, looking for some way to amalgamate a lot of this stuff, and put a story together that contained as much of it as possible, adding whatever I needed to as I went along to get it all to gel.

After that fist ’New FF’ issue came out, the retailers were furious because we didn’t tell them it was going to sell so well. Who the hell knew it was going to sell that well ?

Well, it was a good story. But who knew ? I mean, another funny thing about it was the Punisher. As I mentioned, Arthur didn’t want to draw the Punisher and I didn’t care. But after I thought about it, I said to him, « Well, look, the Punisher is hot right now, and he should really be in the comic, if only for just a second. » I mean, if you’re going to go overboard, you may as well go all the way ! So we worked out a bit where, at the very end of the whole story, the Punisher shows up.

And on the cover, there’s a little inset drawing of the Punisher’s chest showing his skull and uniform with some copy like, « Most exploitative appearance of a guest star ever ! ». You don’t see his head on the cover, just the chest and skull design.

And then on the inside, he’s in a Punisher helicopter, and he’s wearing a flight helmet and sitting in his flight suit. There’s never a whole body shot of the Punisher in the entire comic. He shows up in the end, says, « Well, I guess they’re all done », and he leaves. And that was the whole Punisher bit. Arthur was game to draw that much Punisher !

@Le_Doc

FANTASTIC FOUR #347-349 :

Dans l’arc narratif en 3 numéros qui va de Fantastic Four #347 à 349, Walt Simonson a remplacé les 4 Fantastiques par les plus grandes stars du moment (Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine et Ghost Rider) suite aux manipulations d’une Skrull venue sur Terre pour retrouver une arme très particulière, sous la forme d’un oeuf qui doit donner naissance à un « technotroïde inorganique » , une machine à tuer qu’elle compte utiliser pour assassiner l’empereur Skrull. Cette saga en trois parties est pleine d’action, de rebondissements, d’humour, de créatures, du comic-book bien fun et idéalement servi par les superbes dessins de Art Adams, grand amateur de monstres classiques (et ici, il s’en est donné à coeur joie avec les extraterrestres métamorphes et les habitants de l’Île de l’Homme-Taupe).

Ce qui est aussi amusant, c’est que cette histoire a été imaginée parce que Walt Simonson était en retard sur ses délais et qu’il avait besoin de temps pour poursuivre ses intrigues en cours. Il s’est alors dit qu’un team-up avec Spider-Man serait une chouette idée. Et c’est Kurt Busiek qui lui a suggéré d’utiliser Ghost Rider, Wolverine et le Punisher, que l’on retrouvait (sans exagérer) absolument partout en ce début des années 90. Sauf que Art Adams n’aimait pas vraiment le Punisher et a donc demandé à ce que le Hulk gris prenne sa place.

Tous les éléments étaient donc assemblés pour ce très bon divertissement. Walt Simonson s’en est même amusé avec les accroches de la revue : The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine a donc été remplacé par The World’s Goofiest , The World’s most commercialest et The World’s most collectable Comic Magazine . Mais pour que le gag soit complet, il fallait bien le « cameo le plus opportuniste du monde » . Le Punisher a donc eu droit à une apparition totalement inutile sur la dernière page. Tellement inutile qu’elle a été supprimée lors de la première traduction dans Nova avant d’être réintégrée dans la réédition de ces numéros dans la collection Spider-Man et les Héros Marvel !

@Marko

Walt Simonson à propos du #352 (extrait de « Comics Creators on Fantastic Four ») :

Tom DeFalco : Getting back to FF #352 - the cover is part of the story, and I remember when I first read it, I thought, « What the hell ? »

Walt Simonson : That comic is among my favourite pieces of my own work: one of the single issues I’m proudest of. I feel I did something nobody else had done in comics before. I’m not doing it again, either ! I’ve been there, done that, but in the process I got a solution to a storytelling problem that I thought worked really well. It requires a tad more effort on the reader’s part than most comic books, but that’s not bad thing. In fact, I wasn’t even going to include a key on how to read the issue ; it seemed so obvious to me, because I had been working on it for months. However, Weezie (Louise Simonson) said, « No, no, you’d better put an explanation in there. » So I typed up an explanation and put it in the letter column - upside down, like the solution to a brainteaser.

That issue was at least inspired by Roger Zelazny’s novel, Creatures of Light and Darkness. I haven’t read it in a million years, but there’s a scene in there with a ruined city, and the way I remember it is that he has these figures strobing through, buildings falling and other stuff going on, and it turns out that there are a couple of combatants in a mode Zelazny called temporal fugue. They move around in time, and the other guy shifts, and they fight through eternity destroying and re-destroying the city. A great image.

So, after all the times Reed and Doom had fought, when it was my turn to make them fight, I wanted to make the whole confrontation as different as possible. I had the idea of this sort of time-fight, where they’re moving around in time ; fighting each other that way. And, of course, it’s already been established that Doom had that time square of his, so he was already associated with time travel. To the extent that it didn’t seem like a stretch to work this particular fight into this story. And besides, he’d just come back from elsewhere with all this new technology.

Plot-wise, I had to work out two sequences. The first was about what was happening in ordinary time. The second was choreographing Reed and Doom jumping around, minute to minute, fighting each other: striking, and then jumping to a different time, each jump following the previous one and so on. I decided the way to do this was to borrow from the kids’ books choose-your-own-adventure books where you read a page and have to choose between two doors. If you choose the green door, you’re sent to page forty-five ; if you choose the red door you go to page seventy-six. Basically, the page forks ; you follow where the forks go and you can read the book in a variety of different ways. I wasn’t doing forks but I thought I could use the device.

I didn’t want to make the fight too long — because you read a comic fairly quickly and because I thought the device would get hold fast — so I chose a starting time and had Reed and Doom fight over about forty minutes of real time.

Essentially, I wanted the physical act of the reader turning the pages to reinforce the notion of the combatants jumping through time. Once I got the time-fight organised across the comic effectively, I taped the regular story layouts and the time-fight layouts together so I wouldn’t mix them up, and began matching the time jumps to my clocks. Basically, what it did was give me a comic that you really had to read at least twice in order to understand the sequencing. You had one regular sequence, which began on page one and ended on page twenty-two, and you had the time-fight sequence that really began on about page three and went through about eighteen pages. But you had to jump all over the book in order to read that sequence in order. And it does read in order. It’s all there.

Then I got really clever — maybe too clever, as I’m sure that many readers actually figured it out. In the previous issue, Reed had been caught by Dr Doom in a very simple trap: a cul-de-sac with no exits. There was no crack to ooze through, no obvious way out, and all the over FF members were trapped.

At the end of the issue, Reed shows up to confront Doom and they prepare to have their time-fight. But there’s never an explanation for how Reed gets out of the cul-de-sac. Nobody thought about it much. You know, it was Reed — he shows up.

But what actually happens is that the next issue, the splash page begins at 1am. The cover as a clock on it, set to 12:33. And the cover image is Reed exploding out of a bunch of flying rocks.

If you read the time-fight, you’ll find that at some point Reed has managed to arm himself with some kind of a techno-magic quarterstaff and — when Doom blasts him — Reed catches the blast with the quarterstaff and redirects it to 12:33am. So what Reed’s doing is blowing himself out of the trap that he was caught in previously. That’s him escaping from the cul-de-sac on the cover ! I love time paradoxes !
Kleefeld on Comics: On History: Fantastic Four #352

[victor_newman]

@Le_Doc

Ce qui est aussi amusant, c’est que cette histoire a été imaginée parce que Walt Simonson était en retard sur ses délais et qu’il avait besoin de temps pour poursuivre ses intrigues en cours

Et est devenue culte.

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

Moi je dirais oui
On a l arc avec faralis qui est superbe, les new ff c est super… il me semble qu il ya l arc tva sympa
Et defalco c est la meilleure partie du run
Je dirais donc que c est tres bon

[n.n.nemo]

@Marko

Ou alors pour les fans de Fatalis (même si ce relooking n’a pas duré longtemps).

Il y a tout le run de simonson ?

Je croyais uniquement les episodes avec les new ff.

Y a du très bon dedans, tout le début autour de nebula et le plus reussi des duels red/fatalis.

[Marko]

@n.n.nemo

Il y a tout le run de simonson ?

Non, l’autre partie c’est là-dedans (ou alors les visionaries) :

[prunes]

Merci pour les retours…Il y a boire et à manger à ce que je lis…N’étant pas un inconditionnel des ff, je ferai l’impasse sur ce tome.

Néanmoins, je me suis pris l’omnibus de waid (un bon moment de lecture) et je prendrai les omnibus d’hickman.

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

Ce qu il y a dans cet épic est au-dessus de ces omnibus

[Lord-of-babylon (Lord)]

@prunes

Néanmoins, je me suis pris l’omnibus de waid (un bon moment de lecture) et je prendrai les omnibus d’hickman.

Perso je dirais

Simonson/Waid
Hickman
De Falco

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

Simonson
De falco si on parle du debut
Waid (y a l arc de doom et celui du paradis de bons)
Hickman

[soyouz (FC powaaaa)]

Et Lee/Kirby ?

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

Prunes n en parle pas sinon kirby et byrne sont devant

[Fred_le_Mallrat]

De toute facon tout les ff pre onslaught dont devant hickmann(sur la serie principale) et la plupart du post a part millar et peut etre jms ou mcduffie et bien sur fraction