Fantastic Four v.2 Issue #1

One cbr file | 23 Mb | 40 pages

There was a time in the comic book universe that it was doubtful that Jim Lee would draw another issue of anything again. Lee retired from drawing books after his final issue of W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S. with issue #13 (Lee is currently penciling the new W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S. series).

He also drew an issue of the Savage Dragon, which kind of backfired when creator Erik Larson discovered that Jim killed off one of the Dragon's main characters. You would think that Jim and Erik would have talked about something like that before the issue was released. Larson ended up redoing that issue so that his character was resurrected.

So for a year or two Jim was only writing stories and then he suddenly decided to make a comeback with Gen 13 v2 issues 6 & 7. Jim was temporarily back, but his artwork was not nearly as impressive as regular Gen 13 artist at the time J. Scott Campbell.

It wasn't until Lee announced that he and Rob Liefeld would undertake Marvel's Heroes Reborn project that Lee returned to his super talented penciling. The whole idea with Heroes Reborn was to jump start some Marvel titles that were selling at the bottom of the charts: Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Avengers. It's hard to believe it now, but practically no one who bought comic books in 1996 cared about these titles until Heroes Reborn. If Heroes Reborn didn't revive these titles it's likely that Marvel would have buried them 6 feet under and we wouldn't be talking about a sequel to the Fantastic Four movie today.

Yeah, Marvel sold out. You'll do anything to stay afloat if your company is battling bankruptcy. Even handing over a coveted property like Captain America to an idiot like Liefeld made sense at the time. So Marvel hired guns from Image comics to reimagine these characters with a modern style. The great thing about Heroes Reborn was that we finally got to see Jim Lee draw FF. The bad thing about it was that Liefeld basically ruined the experience for everyone. That whiny, cry baby. He couldn't get his crappy drawings of Captain America (with breasts) out in time and got his butt fired. Lee had to cover for him and ended up leaving the penciling tasks of Fantastic Four to Brett Booth after issue #6. Booth did some amazing pencils for issues #7-9 and then he suddenly disappeared. You could tell that things were just up in the air with Fantastic Four by the time issue #10 came out. Ron Lim taking over for Lee and Booth? Wasn't the point of Heroes Reborn not to have Marvel artists drawing the book?

Here's issue #1 of Volume 2 of the Fantastic Four. If you think Lee's pencils are tight for this double-sized issue extravaganza, just wait until issue #2 when he cranked it up another level. Bauer out.

Fantastic Four v.2 Issue #1