Fantastic Four 227
“The Brain Parasites!”
Published November 1980
Writer: Doug Moench
Pencils: Bill Sienkiewicz
Inks: Bruce Patterson
Letters: Jim Novak
Colors: George Roussos
Editor: Jim Salicrup
Cover: Sienkiewicz and Joe Sinnott


Synopsis

An old colleague asks for Mr. Fantastic’s help investigating a meteor that landed in a Florida lake and the team plus Franklin embark on a working vacation to assist Dr. Carruthers. Once there, they discover ordinary animals are dramatically transformed into dangerous monsters by parasites that were carried by the meteor. The parasites also transform Carruthers and the Invisible Girl but are saved when the parasites are removed. It is then revealed that Franklin used his powers to destroy the monsters and parasites.

What’s going on here?

This is another old-timey science fiction story from Doug Moench that has echoes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Moench used the mysterious-meteor-with-strange-effects just a few issues ago — it’s how Korgon the giant Viking got his powers — and the FF-encounter-strange-underwater-monsters-on-a-Florida-vacation plot was previously used by Stan and Jack in FF 97.

We’re now seven issues into the Moench run and it seems pretty clear he’s most comfortable with a certain type of story that hews closely to traditional horror and sci-fi tropes. There is a place for those stories, and they can be done quite effectively in the Fantastic Four as we shall see, but telling only those stories wastes the potential of the FF. The Fantastic Four is at its best with big, sweeping epics where the villains are truly menacing and the stakes are high. I had lots of quibbles with Marv Wolfman’s run but he at least understood the importance of big stories. (This is also my main critique of the FF’s current writer, Ryan North, who prefers to deliver monthly science lessons rather than invest in multi-issue arcs.) There are four more issues of Moench; hopefully things pick up.

Joe Sinnott is again MIA (although he did ink the cover), with Bruce Patterson handling the inking. Patterson seems like a jack-of-all-comic-trades — with credits as inker, letterer and colorist — and worked steadily for both Marvel and DC from the mid 70s to the late 90s. His inks are heavy and brooding in this comic, and he gives on Reed and Johnny hollow cheeks that make them look haggard and gaunt.

What I liked

There were some fun action sequences, and Bill Sienkiewicz seems to have a blast with the monsters that attack the FF. As in this splash:

Or here:

I’m not sure this time-lapse sequence of the parasite crawling up Sue is totally successful — initially I thought she was covered in multiple parasites — but it looks cool.

What I didn’t like

The “spontaneous vacation” idea is pretty tired by now. I guess Moench thought he needed a good reason to get Franklin on the trip, but it feels forced.

Also, these recent issues have sequences of panels that jump from scene to scene without any explanation. Like here:

It’s not hard to follow the story, but I’m not sure what is accomplished by the cutting back and forth, either. I do like Franklin’s Spider-Man pool float.

Wait, did Moench finds a way to drop in a cameo of a character from one of his other books? Who could have seen that coming?

Anything else?

This is a cool house ad for a Roger Stern / Frank Miller Dr. Strange collaboration that never happened. You can read why here.

Overall

A heaping dose of me.