Today, we look back to 10 years ago, when a twisted version of the new Fantastic Four was formed with Venom, Red Hulk, Ghost Rider and X-23.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
Today, we go back to February 2012 for the first five parts of “The Circle of Four,” by a variety of creators. I’ll list them all right here (note that Remender, Parker and Williams plotted the whole thing out together):
Venom #13 (by Rick Remender, Tony Moore and Val Staples)Venom #13.1 (by Rob Williams, Lee Garbett and Rob Schwager)Venom #13.2 (by Rob Williams and Sana Takeda)Venom #13.3 (by Jeff Parker, Julian Tedesco and Dommo Sanchez Amara) Venom #13.4 (by Rick Remender, Lan Medina, Nelson DeCastro, Terry Pallot, Marte Gracia and Antonio Fabela)
WHAT WAS THE NEW FANTASTIC FOUR?
Fantastic Four #347-349 was a clever response by Walter Simonson to the way that the speculator boom was, well, you know, booming, so Simonson brought in his friend, superstar artist Arthur Adams, and they did a storyline leaning into the speculator craze in an amusing way by having a villain seemingly kill off the Fantastic Four and thus force the creation of a NEW Fantastic Four…made up of four of the hottest Marvel superheroes of the time, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Ghost Rider!
The whole thing was a delightful sort of parody of the excesses of modern comic books (Punisher even makes a cameo, just for the sake of saying that he made a cameo), while, of course, enjoying those excesses, as well!
HOW DID THE CIRCLE OF FOUR COME TOGETHER?
Fast forward a dozen years, Venom #13 brought the various characters of the story all to Las Vegas. Flash Thompson had recently gone AWOL with his Venom symbiote and the Red Hulk (Thunderbolt Ross) decides to bring him back to the Army. Meanwhile, Laura Kinney (X-23) is in Vegas because some bad guy stole some of her blood and she wants it back (and revenge on him for stealing it). Johnny Blaze and Alejandra Jones (the new Ghost Rider and the former Ghost Rider) just happened to be in the area when they discovered that the bad guy that X-23 was in town to take down was actually the demon Blackheart and he has literally brought a piece of Hell to Las Vegas…
Johnny Blaze used all of his powers to hold the incursion from Hell at bay, but it involves him riding his bike basically in a centrifuge around the demonic stuff, as well as a powerful talisman holding it back, but he also calls Daimon Hellstrom to come help out.
Meanwhile, Alejandra, X-23 and Red Hulk and Venom (they had to stop their fighting when the demons came a-coming) all find themselves in front of Blackheart…
Blackheart then responds to them with a group of demonic villains known as The Antitheses, with them all being opposites of the heroes (X-666, Ichor, The Evangelist and Encephalon)….
The fights with the villains honestly take up most of the next two issues, along with Hellstrom showing up and teaming up with Doctor Strange to help back up Johnny Blaze. Things get crazier, though, when Alejandra is seduced by Blackheart into removing Johnny’s talisman, thus letting hell TOTALLY loose on Earth!
There’s a great sequence where we see each of the members of The Circle of Four get their fondest desires before they are twisted and torn away from them, confirming that they are now in hell themselves…
But that might not be a BAD thing, per se, as Mephisto doesn’t like what Blackheart is doing, either, so he might help them…
Sadly, in the final issue, Blackheart also manages to cut a deal with his “brother,” Daimon Hellstrom…
and Daimon turns on Doctor Strange…
The Circle of Four must come up with a way to come back against Blackheart and, ya know what? What they come up with is so interesting that I think I’m going to give it its own spotlight (especially since it mostly takes place in the finale of the storyline, which was in March 2012). Still, this clever twist on the New Fantastic Four idea was really cool, I thought, and one of the best uses of the decimal numbering that Marvel did.
If you folks have any suggestions for March (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
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