Customer Reviews

Fantastic Four Visionaries - George Perez, Vol. 2

5 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Marvel adds another misleading entry to their series of Visionaries trades with FANTASTIC FOUR VISIONARIES: GEORGE PEREZ VOLUME 2. Once again focusing solely on an artist, instead of a writer/artist, they trumpet the work of George Perez, apparently claiming that he, a fresh face at Marvel at the time, was a "visionary" who made these FF stories worthwhile... as if the writers had nothing to do with it. Don't get me wrong, I am a big George Perez fan, but what did he really accomplish artistically with these characters that had not already been done by Jack Kirby? Labeling Perez' work on the FF as visionary, especially when it was from so early in his career, is ludicrous.

Anyway, I gave Volume 1 a 2-star review, due to the above problems, along with the fact that stories were often incomplete due to Perez rotating with other artists. Volume 2 gets the dreaded 1-star review due to more of the same, plus some worse: the fact that it contains some non-Perez work - not to provide complete stories, but to bulk up the page count. It seems that Marvel didn't have enough FF work from him to make it as big as volume 1, so they included some additional random bits from the Annuals. This is just stupid... really, this trade paperback defies logic. I mean, Volume 1 at the least could claim to be exclusively the work of George Perez, but Volume 2 can't even claim that. So what we have here is a compilation with no point whatsoever.

But let's get to the stories. This volume includes FF #187 - 188, 191 - 192, and Annuals 14-15; Marvel Two-In-One #60; and Adventures Of The Thing #3. They feature the Molecule Man, Agatha Harkness and Salem's Seven, those nasty Skrulls, the Texas Twister, the Impossible Man, the return of the Terrible Trio, and living statues of Diablo, Blastarr, and Dr. Doom. So there are some fun stories here, and the gaps aren't as obvious as in Volume 1; however, I have too many problems with this book to give it a passing review. This is not a bashing of George Perez, but of Marvel for releasing such a weak trade collection.