Fantastic Four has been experiencing a renaissance since writer Ryan North has taken over the book. This is the best the Fantastic Four have been in over a decade, and their central role in One World Under Doom has helped raise their profile even more. With Doom ruling the world, the Fantastic Four immediately jump into action, but Doom did something that the Fantastic Four never could — cure Ben Grimm of his mutation. That’s where Fantastic Four #31 kicks off. The Thing is at his lowest ebb, and the team makes a fateful decision in order to help him get his powers back. What follows is everything that a Fantastic Four should be.
North’s run has been spectacular so far, because he gets what makes the team work. The Fantastic Four is a sci-fi family, and both of those things are equally important. Fantastic Four #31 does a wonderful job of presenting them as a family, working together to solve their problems. The team has been through a lot since One World Under Doom has started, and North brings back an idea from 2017’s Marvel Two-In-One that recasts Doom’s action of curing Ben into a fatal blow to the Fantastic Four. It’s something that most fans haven’t thought of since that book ended, and shows that North is always doing his homework on the team.
From there, we get a perfect Fantastic Four plot — the team traveling through time and the multiverse to get Ben’s power back. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be happening in a Fantastic Four. It’s a great sci-fi idea, and what makes this work so well is that it’s informed by the Fantastic Four’s familial relationship. The team isn’t just going to take their dangerous trip through time and space just to get Ben’s powers back, all while theirs fade, because they’re teammates. They care about Ben and the toll that transforming back to human has had on him, and want him to feel better. This is actually a pretty fun twist on the old idea of Ben hating his Thing form. Ben has reached a point where being the Thing is no longer the curse that it was; he’s grown to love it. Losing those powers has had a negative impact on his life. This is frankly fantastic writing from North. This issue is exactly the way a Fantastic Four comic should be written, and it’s why this is the most acclaimed Marvel book without the word “Ultimate” in the title.
RELATED: One of Marvel’s Strangest Fantastic Four Villains Returns
Cory Smith and Oren Junior showed off what they could do in last year’s “Sabretooth War”, which was a bloody masterpiece. Luckily, they’re just as good here. From the book’s opening pages — a replaying of the events of the original Fantastic Four #1 — it looks sensational and it stays great from there. Because of the focus on familial relationships in Fantastic Four, the character acting has to be especially good. Smith is able to supply that on every page. Davos the Devastator, a nice deep cut Fantastic Four villain, shows up and there’s a cool little action scene that works out beautifully. Junior’s inks give the lines a nice heft to them, really helping enhance Smith’s pencils.
There’s a scene after the fight of Johnny trying to convince everyone that his powers aren’t on the fritz and it hits so well because of Smith and Junior. They’re able to sell Johnny’s acting, and Susan’s eye roll is just perfect. The first time that Ben doesn’t get his powers back from the cosmic radiation bath is wonderfully rendered, capturing Ben’s disappointment, which builds in every subsequent failure. This is exactly what art for a Fantastic Four should do. Smith and Junior are able to hit all the right points with the sci-fi and the action — when the team starts traveling through the multiverse, there are some really cool panels of alternate universes of the team — and they’re also able to sell the feelings of the characters, helping to illustrate the relationships of the team.
One of the biggest problems with Fantastic Four in the years since the end of the Hickman run (other than Marvel marginalizing them because they didn’t have the film rights until recently) has been that most of the time, one aspect of the team was pushed beyond the other, and the book was never able to do what a Fantastic Four comic should do. It was either too sci-fi, too superhero, or too family oriented. North’s run has succeeded so well because he has found the perfect balance of all the things that a Fantastic Four comic should have. Fantastic Four #31 is basically a perfect Fantastic Four comic in every way. The writing is constantly impressive, doing some deep lore digs and using them to inform the story he set up in One World Under Doom, hitting the right emotional notes, and giving readers an awesome cliffhanger ending. The art brings it all to life wonderfully. Future Fantastic Four creative teams need to take a look at this issue and follow it as a blueprint.
Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Published by Marvel
Released on April 30, 2025
Written by Ryan North
Art by Cory Smith
Inks by Oren Junior
Colors by Jesus Aburtov
Letters by Joe Caramagan
Fantastic Four #31 is on sale now.
The post Fantastic Four #31 Is the Epitome of What a Fantastic Four Comic Should Be (Review) appeared first on ComicBook.com.
