Editor's Note: Fantastic Four #568 arrives in stores tomorrow, July 1.

"Doom's Master: Part Three of Four"

I feel very ambivalent about this issue of Fantastic Four. On one hand, it brings the "Masters of Doom" story begun by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch a step closer to its natural conclusion, finally bringing the titular characters into direct conflict with the Fantastic Four on an epic scale. On the other hand, the presence of so many different creators (two writers, two pencillers, two inkers and two colourists) makes the issue feel disjointed in places, diluting the distinctive flavour of Millar and Hitch's previous issues and failing to capture the story as effectively as the creators might have managed on their own.

Despite the issue being scripted by Joe Ahearne, the story is still credited to Mark Millar -- so I presume that Ahearne was working from a fairly tightly-plotted outline. Many of the story's central ideas are as strong as we've come to expect from Millar's run on the book. The Masters of Doom come up with some pretty sick punishments for the FF, including forcing Sue to choose which of her children should be killed and showing Johnny the many different ways in which his sister's multiversal counterparts have been killed. There's also a interesting moment in which the Marquis of Death offers Reed Richards an unexpected choice that suggests that the villain's mission may be as much to put himself out of his own misery as to destroy everyone else. Finally, fans of Millar's work will probably be most excited by the inventive scene that explicitly connects his run on Fantastic Four to two other recent projects: the 1985 miniseries and Wolverine's "Old Man Logan."

However, there are weaknesses in the story that prevent it from being as powerful as it might have been. One problem is that the powers of the "Masters of Doom" have never been clearly defined. Whilst this opens up all sorts of storytelling possibilities, allowing the villains to do anything that they choose (they've already displayed psychic abilities, telekinesis, levitation, teleportation, the ability to create illusions and the power to travel between dimensions at will), readers never get a sense of their limitations. This makes it difficult to invest in their fight with the FF, as any attack by our heroes could be countered by the book's writers pulling yet another new ability out of their hat for their antagonists.

There are also some problems with the storytelling mechanics in the form of a few panel-to-panel transitions that feel like disjointed non-sequiturs. At one point, The Thing goes straight from a tearful, intimate moment with his fiancée to defending them from an attack on her home; another sees the sudden appearance of the Marquis of Death at the window of the Baxter Building, when the FF had been happily chatting in front of it just a moment beforehand. On both of these occasions, it might have been nice to have at least one panel to show the event occur before showing the characters' reactions to it, since the inclusion of both in one panel disrupts the flow of the storytelling.

The writers also fumble the final page reveal, failing to clearly establish what's actually happening in the Where’s Wally-esque double-splashpage that closes the issue. It makes the moment confusing when it should be exciting, and I can only hope that the script explains it more clearly at the start of the next issue.

The issue's dialogue veers between some insightful observations -- "This world seems to suffer more than the others" refers to the Earth's reaction to the attack of the Masters of Doom, but could also be a reference to the laws of storytelling that dictate that the heroes of the Marvel Universe should constantly face conflict in order to remain interesting -- to trite, clunky phrases that undermine the nasty tone of the story ("You're a liar, Marquis. Hope is something you can't kill"). There are also places where there seems to be a mismatch between the script and the artwork: would the wisecracking Ben Grimm really be weeping buckets at the same time as he makes a crack about his Aunt Petunia?

Talking of the artwork, this issue is the first of Millar and Hitch's run to truly suffer from the surfeit of artists assigned to its pages. Bryan Hitch and Neil Edwards are both accomplished pencillers (with Edwards recently making his Marvel debut in some well-illustrated issues of Squadron Supreme), and both share a similar pencilling style. Here, both artists manage to pull off some well-composed and dynamic pages that are impressive in their own right. However, the multiple inkers don't manage to make the transition between one artist and another smooth: in fact, their work has the opposite effect.

The inkers weight their lines differently and render different panels in varying levels of detail (sometimes within the same scene), which has the effect of making the artwork frequently feel disjointed from panel to panel. You can see the difference for yourself in the preview pages below. Whilst the issue might have been able to hold things together with one penciller and several inkers (or conversely, with more than one penciller but with a single unifying inking style), this combination doesn't make for a good example of visually coherent storytelling. Having said that, things do improve towards the end of the issue, with a more cohesive look and feel for the second half of the book.

This issue is very much a mixed bag, with several well-executed moments that sit side-by-side with some less-than-great scenes. For every clever concept or well-written exchange, there's a moment of slightly fumbled storytelling that pulls you out of the book. For every impressive image or well-visualised idea, there's a jarring visual transition that disrupts the flow of the artwork. Whilst I'm sure that fans of Millar and Hitch's run on Fantastic Four will still enjoy this issue, it's not quite up to the standard of previous chapters, and so feels slightly disappointing in comparison to what’s come before.

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