Monday, August 11, 2014

Fantastic Four: Big Town #3 (of 4)


Fantastic Four: Big Town (2001) #4
‘Big Town’ comes to a dramatic close. The city is supposed to be celebrating the upcoming nuptials of Johnny Storm and a young girl whose also the head of the FFs public relations department. But a hack job into the Manhattan main frame by Ultron has put a timer on the life of the city and ultimately the world. The Red Skull, Magneto, Sub-Mariner, and even the Hulk have declared that unless all super heroes stand down, the mainframe creation of Reed Richards and Tony Stark will go critical and destroy the Big Apple. (Also, this will set off a chain reaction in which the power grids of the world will also power down, thus placing the planet back into the middle ages.)
  The ending was both shocking but predictable with one exception. I’m actually not 100% sure if the Big Town survived or went critical. I don’t want to give away too much, because I feel like this is a hidden dollar box gem that people really should take notice of because of how similar situations in the Marvel NOW! books are to ‘Big Town.’ But I really am not sure if everybody died and the city’s squad of robot maintenance workers started to clean up automatically or if the final page takes place centuries in the future in which humanity no longer exists only the automation of Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man’s utopia still function without masters. Either way, the book ending on a note similar to Wall-E or some Twilight Zone episode about the potential dangers of technology.
I hate it when books end ambiguously and that’s the main reason I give this final chapter such a low mark. But the series itself is good and some readers love endings in which you get to come up with your own ending. I just happen to not favor those type of stories.
Worth Consuming.
Rating: 7 out of 10 stars
Overall series rating: 8 out of 10 stars

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