Word: simonson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Back in 1991, before Marvel comics completely tanked creatively and financially, they gave Walt Simonson writing and penciling duties on "The Fantastic Four," issues #350, 352, 353, and 354. (Number 351 was a throwaway, "filler" issue.) I doubt the title has seen such a highlight since then. These four issues are some of the best mainstream comic entertainment I have read. And issue 352 stands alone as a pinnacle not just of the series, but the art form...
...called "Mighty Marvel Manner," a combination of idiot-level exposition, purple prose, absurdly contrived fight scenes and melodramatic pathos, can be done right or wrong. Mostly it gets done wrong. But when done right, as by its founders Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and here by Simonson, it can be a delight and impossible to put down. On the first page of this four-issue series Dr. Doom hovers over a storm-swept castle as his doom-bots, "the banshees of hate," come, "skirling down through the sleet... carried on the wings of the whistling wind!" I challenge...
...time, so it makes sense that the "timeless" Richards/Doom sequences take place more or less without them. Look carefully and you may also notice that these single, long panels are made to seem on top of, not next to the linear panels of the other, more conventional, story. Simonson's visual motif reflects the nature of the story being told, namely a battle outside of time yet related to the events underneath...
...other two issues of this Walt Simonson run, 353 and 354, are more or less denouements to the story that begins and ends in 350 and 352. Still, they are highly imaginative and even funny, involving the team's tangle with a cosmic bureaucracy known as the Time Variance Authority...