Fantastic Four First Foes: Dragon Man #1 // Review
The celebrity Quartet are being welcomed onto the campus of Columbia University. There there to make a big appearance. And these aren't just any celebrities. They're superheroes. And as much as they might be loved by the general public, they are going to be issues. And there's always going to be awkward things that are going to come up when a celebrities run into the general public. There are bound to be people who take advantage of that sort of thing. This is precisely what we findFantastic Four First Foes: Dragon Man #1. Writer Greg Pak repackages an old Jack Kirby premise from the 1960s with artist Mark Buckingham. Color comes to the page courtesy of Alex SInclair.
Ben Grimm doesn't exactly feel at home in Columbia. As it is, he's suffering as a celebrity. But he's also a big orange rocky guy due to cosmic radiation. It's one thing to see this type of hero from afar. It's another thing entirely to actually see him in person. And so naturally people are going to be a little bit disturbed by his presence. He finds himself in a lab of a professor. Somebody who's worked as an alchemist. Wasn't he happen to be working on a project that involves a monster. He promises them that he can turn him back to normal. And that's the source of the problem.
Pak does a pretty good job of isolating some of the aspects that makeDragon Man what he is. The original concept by Jack Kirby is presented in a very focused and concentrated script that doesn't leave room for a whole lot of additional story. It's interesting to see the origin of.Dragon Man and the first appearance of Diablo done in such a concentrated format. The original series had its own momentum back in the 1960s. There was a lot of other stuff going on. So it's kind of interesting to see had done again. Although it's not handled with a great deal of additional insight.
And keeping with the overall format of some of the latest Fantastic Four comics, Buckingham does a pretty good job of rendering the characters the way they looked in the movie. There is some interesting drama brought to the page. The action feels a little stiff. And the rendering feels a little bit loose and clumsy in places. The basic element of the story gets brought across quite well. And the coloring by Sinclair, lens some depth and warmth to the art.
It’s a bit strange to see the reasonably successful film from last year continuing to drive the overall aesthetic of one-shot comics a little over a year later. The production design of the movie and the overall look of all of the characters makes it to the page, but it doesn’t feel like it’s adding a whole lot to what the movie already did. Furthermore...it’s not actually doing a whole lot that Kirby didn’t already do when introducing Dragon Man back in the 1960s.
