If you don’t know Alex Ross by name, his artwork is immediately recognisable. The artist behind comics like DC’s Kingdom Come and Marvel’s, uh, Marvels, Ross’ beautifully painted pages are the combination of Norman Rockwell-esque realism with the colourful spandex of superheroes. For his latest work, the graphic novel Fantastic Four: Full Circle, Ross has tried something different, trading Rockwell for a 1960s pop art aesthetic.
For the past few years, Ross has mostly been working as a cover artist on Marvel titles like Black Panther, Captain America and Immortal Hulk, which has resulted in some of his career-best work. While it’s been a few years since he’s done long-form interior work, he hasn’t missed a beat with Full Circle.
Drawn and written by Ross, with colour assistance by Josh Johnson and lettered by Ariana Mahar, Fantastic Four: Full Circle is a direct sequel to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four #51. As far as superhero stories go, Full Circle has a fairly meat and potatoes plot – a mysterious intruder suddenly appears in the Baxter Building, interrupting the Thing’s midnight snack and unleashing a swarm of Negative Zone beasties. A fight kicks off, which leads to the Fantastic Four leaping into the Negative Zone to discover who and why this figure attacked them.
It’s a fairly straightforward sci-fi, superhero adventure and Ross has a solid handle on the Fantastic Four’s individual voices. While there are better-written Fantastic Four stories out there, Ross’ writing isn’t the star of this show, his art is. And FF: Full Circle looks absolutely stunning.
Normally, Ross’ art can feel a bit stiff at times. There’s a certain cleanness to it. It certainly looks nice, but in his pursuit of capturing these characters hyper-realistically, his pages can sometimes read like individual static paintings and lack the flow of sequential storytelling. It certainly looks nice, but it can take you out of the story by making you aware that you’re looking at a painting.
When drawing Full Circle, Ross tried something new. Instead of painting his pages, Ross worked with inks, electing to use flat colours, no modern shading techniques and a limited palette. The result is a stunning transformation of his artwork. By inking his lines, Ross brings something new to his work. While the figures and poses are still distinctly Ross’, there’s an extra grit and texture to his linework. If you look close enough you can see feathered edges in the details and the wrinkles.
There’s even a digital dot screen effect that has also been overlayed on Ross’ work, which evokes the Ben-Day dotting of old comics and the pop art works of Roy Lichenstein.
On top of that, he makes some bold colour and lighting choices that give his work an unreal look, channelling the more abstract nature of Kirby’s Silver Age superhero work. While in the Negative Zone, Ross uses a fluorescent palette contrasted against deep blacks, which gives pages an almost radioactive feel and makes them look like old blacklight paintings. It’s an unearthly aesthetic for a far-out setting.
If you’re not familiar with the Fantastic Four, this book is friendly to newer readers. Despite being a sequel to a comic that was published almost 60 years ago, Ross does a good job of catching us up to speed without the exposition feeling forced. The dust jacket flap even folds out to reveal an abridged origin story for the superhero team, which is a nice touch. And if you’re a longtime fan of Marvel’s first family – especially if you love the Kirby and Lee era – then you’ll get a lot out of this comic, both as a story and visually. It’s an exciting read and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better-looking superhero comic published this year.
Fantastic Four: Full Circle is a stunning pop-art-inflected tribute to Marvel’s bombastic Silver Age and a great reminder that Alex Ross is a master of his craft, who is still looking to push himself. There’s one moment where the book’s villain, on the edge of victory, mocks Mister Fantastic, telling him, “Your work isn’t what it used to be… It’s less than what people expect from you. Everyone thought you were fantastic.” It’s hard not to read this character as a winking nod to Ross’ insecurities, and the reason why he chose to draw Full Circle differently than usual makes much more sense.
The book itself is oversized – about an inch taller and wider than your standard comic – which is the perfect scale for Ross’ art. Fantastic Four: Full Circle is the kind of comic that needs to be read big. Splash pages, like when the Fantastic Four first enter the Negative Zone, falling through the “Crossroads of Infinity”, really let Ross cut loose with layouts and are much more breathtaking at this size.
Full Circle is also the first graphic novel published under the MarvelArts banner, a new collaboration between Marvel and Abrams Books’ ComicArts imprint. If this is the bar of quality set by this partnership, then the MarvelArts project could easily become the most exciting thing Marvel has done in years.
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