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Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham take on a truly Herculean task—making Reed Richards an interesting hero for the 21st century.

Let’s face it, The Fantastic Four has always been your father’s comic book and Reed Richards has always been your father.  As the head of the Fantastic Four family, he’s the ultimate patriarch in comics, always wise and gentle but strong and firm when the bad kids like Paste Pot Pete or Diablo would show up.  As well as your father, he’s always been the smartest kid in the class, even when the class is filled with geniuses like Tony Stark, Hank Pym and Bruce Banner.  In other words, he’s been a nerdy father for at least 40 years now.  There’s no way that Reed Richards could be made interesting now, is there?

Jonathan Hickman is turning Reed Richards into something different and new in his latest issues of The Fantastic Four.  Finally we have a Reed who is looking at the big picture and trying to figure out his place in the grand scheme of everything.  In the last issue, Reed set himself out on a new and simple mission:  fix everything.  That mission led him to finding a consortium of Reed Richards from multiple dimensions who have fixed everything.  In The Fantastic Four #571, Hickman shows us what exactly that means.  One Reed has terraformed worlds into giant fields producing crops that feeds all the hungry and starving creatures in a universe.  Another Reed has fought and defeated multiple Doctor Dooms across the dimensions, lobotomizing and imprisoning the captured Doom.  A third Reed performs surgery on his universe.  Hickman shows us so much of what Reed Richards could actually do through this multidimensional council of Reeds that our Reed Richards looks like a child, just discovering his true potential.  When asked “So, do you want to play superhero for the rest of your life… or do you want to solve everything,” you know what Reeds answer is going to be.

Hickman nicely balances out this cosmically minded story with a simple flashback to a 10 year old Reed and his father.  Maybe it’s to emphasize the naive boy that still exists within Reed Richards or maybe it just helps illustrate the questions that buzz around in Reed’s head about his own place in the world but this simple scene grounds Reed Richards in a way he hasn’t been in a long time; he may have been the smartest boy in his class, but he was still just a boy.  Now that he’s grown up, he may be the smartest man around, but he’s still just a man, with the same doubts and insecurities that all men and women have.

An amazing thing that Hickman and his artist Dale Eaglesham do in this issue is actually cram about four or five different adventures into this character-driven issue.  This story has Reed Richards (or a gaggle of Reed Richards) facing down Doctor Doom, Galactus and a swarm of Silver Surfers but those actually aren’t the story that Hickman and Eaglesham are telling.  How many creators would have made an army of Reed Richards tracking down multiple versions of Doctor Doom across the dimensions a much larger story?  And, yeah, it could have been a very cool story but Hickman and Eaglesham want to dive into what those encounters mean to our Reed Richards, how to they change him and get him to question how much is he really capable of?

For as long as I’ve been reading The Fantastic Four, I can’t remember that many great Reed Richards stories.  There have been a plethora of Things stories; Johnny Storm has gotten a nice solo spotlight from time to time and even Susan Richards has been given the dramatic story occasionally but writers tend to forget what makes Reed Richards interesting.  Of course, he works well within the framework of the Fantastic Four but Hickman, by concentrating right now on Reed himself, casts Reed in a new light as a more solo adventurer.  He’s not the team leader and he’s not your father; he’s a man who knows that he is capable of great things.  Now he just needs to figure out what those things are.

Fantastic Four #571
“Solve Everything: Part 2”
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
Drawn by: Dale Eaglesham
Colored by: Paul Mounts
Lettered by: Clayton Cowles

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