With Skrull and zombie troubles safely behind them, the Fantastic Four can finally turn their attention back to their research and romance and whatnot. Or they could if Manhattan wasn’t being threatened by still more interdimensional travelers, that is. Too many, as it happens; I think this must be what newspaper and NPR movie reviewers feel like when watching science fiction. There were a bunch of humanoids that had no apparent way of sharing a common species, although they might have been engineered instead, which would explain that part. And they had a lot of standard nouns for names[1], but I was only ever able to associate a couple of their forms to names, and only one or two more to character types.

The plot was clear enough, I guess. There’s some kind of war (perhaps a God War?) in progress in this other dimension, and all the unsortable Seed 19 people are on the run from a bad guy named Thanatos, who dies and resurrects regularly, for no clear reason beyond that it maybe fits his name. And they have a friend who they’re trying to save that’s apparently pivotal to the war, again for no clear reason. And Thanatos (plus the good guy, who lives in a giant, world-spanning tree[2]) has a long-standing prophecy about how Reed Richards will help him win, which doesn’t really seem like Mr. Fantastic’s style, but I cannot deny that by the end of the book, Reed was ominously constructing something that looks like it might have been the Cosmic Cube, an original series staple that gave people cosmic powers. That Cube was less inexplicable than anything here only because Stan Lee pretty clearly meant for cosmic powers and transistor powers and radiation powers to be cyphers that allowed his protagonists to do whatever they needed to do, via the scientific power of handwavium. I’m not convinced that Mike Carey has such an excuse here, which is probably what made the book so hard to swallow. Give me my underlying rationales, dammit!

[1] I honestly can’t remember any of them except Tesseract, now, or I’d give examples. But the book is in another room, so meh.
[2] I mean actually down inside the guts of it, or whatever trees have. Not up in the branches.