Two universes, both alike in dignity, In fair Marvel, where we lay our scene, Also: DINOSAURS! Your Major Spoilers review of Fantastic Four #12 from Marvel Comics awaits!

FANTASTIC FOUR #12

Writer: Ryan North
Artist: Iban Coello
Colorist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: VC’s Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: October 4, 2023

Previously in Fantastic Four: What happens when a parallel world starts out different from our own but, through random chance and development, begins to resemble our Earth more and more closely? And what happens when those two universes begin to merge not just in style, but literally? It’s a fascinating scientific question that the Fantastic Four will have to consider as they swap places with their counterparts in this other world and find themselves battling for survival in the universe where everyone is a dinosaur!

A NEW ALTERNATE REALITY

With the Baxter Building and their children locked in time-stasis for a year, the Fantastic Four have relocated to the Grimm family farm in Arizona, where The Thing has gotten a distress call from an old friend. When the Fantastic Four arrive, the team finds a strange glowing portal that transports them into another world, where they are immediately taken into custody by a team of Avengers, who believe that they’re somehow that universe’s Fantastic Four turned into bizarre little bipeds. Fortunately, Mister Fantastic has woven computational circuitry into his uniform, allowing him to create a translation matrix and share it with Iron Man. Well, not exactly a man, so much as a brachiosaurus. The saurian natives and the four humans begin comparing notes, finding that their worlds are somehow impossibly similar, right down to the configuration of the superhero teams and their various costumes. They’re so similar, in fact, that the portal between them is an incursion point, the beginning of the end, as the worlds are merging.

Oh, and there’s the problem of T. Rex Doctor Doom.

THAT IS JUST THE UGLIEST COVER

While this issue does give us the fun high-concept visuals of sauropod superheroes, there are a number of things that make this issue hard to look at. The cover image, with a strangely misshapen Invisible Woman in an impossible pose, with garish colors topping it all off, is off-putting. The first page giving us a Thing with no neck whose head hovers above his shoulders with no connection at all, is just plain amateurish. The more human members of the team don’t get it any better, with elongated faces and over-extended necks. (Also, on a completely subjective note, I hate The Human Torch’s mustache.) The story is more successful, but setting aside the novelty of a Spinosaurus Captain America, the idea of two universes colliding was the major element of Johnathan Hickman’s Avengers run, leading up to Secret Wars, which is just a little too close and a little too familiar for my taste. Another tick in the minus column comes with the dialogue, all of which is leaden and overly expository, especially as regards any explanation of the Four’s missing children. Ben Grimm has one of the most awkward and unrealistic conversations I’ve ever read, but there are at least five equally problematic passages to be had in these pages.

BOTTOM LINE: NOT FOR ME

The combination of plot we’ve seen before with art that I don’t want to see puts Fantastic Four #12 in a troublesome place where I can’t really recommend it to anyone, even if the idea of dinosaur Doctor Strange fills me with a strange joy, leaving the issue with a disappointing 2 out of 5 stars overall. If there was a little more subtlety in the art and the dialogue, this could have been a very enjoyable story.

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