After reading the excellent Spider-Man: Life Story, I picked up the Fantastic Four version which unfortunately didn’t quite reach the same heights as Spider-Man’s story.
It’s quite easy to understand why that is. Spider-Man: Life Story was a very unique take on the superhero. Peter Parker has always been a young man and the premise of telling a story where we see him growing up and how that affects him and other superheroes around him was very appealing and unique. With a group of adults, the impact of growing older is significantly smaller.
Fantastic Four: Life Story follows the same formula of telling the story their battle against Galactus from 1960s to 2010s. It just doesn’t quite feel the same when the story doesn’t have such strong growing up theme. It’s hard to feel like this retelling of the story is fundamentally any different from the many others and the passage of time is mostly present through the connections of the decades and real life history.
It’s not a bad story and the storytelling and art work is solid but it just feels too much like any other Fantastic Four story. In the inevitable comparison to Spider-Man version, it just loses its charm. As a life-long fan of Fantastic Four, I think if I had read this before hearing about the Spider-Man comic, I would have enjoyed it way more but it’s just impossible for me to ignore the differences between the two.
The best part of the story was the sub plot of The Invisible Woman Sue Storm-Richards and her growth from being invisible next to Reed Richards even when not using her abilities.