FF #6

"Save the Tiger"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Joe Quinones
colors by Laura Allred

FF makes frightening use of a few genuinely scary real-world fears:  the possibility that someone you trust above most may, in fact, be quietly stabbing you in the back and the realization that a child in your care has seemingly gone missing.  But most of Fraction's FF is a whimsical superhero romp so full of fun that the shadow of Medusa's kidnapping of Bentley-23 is even darker.

Waking up alone in the room he shares with Bentley-23, Dragon Man begins to wonder where the mini-villain is.  There's an innate absurdity in so much of the details of the Future Foundation, and Fraction's eccentric vision and Quinones' clean, colorful style—less anatomically precise than his predecessor Allred, but busier with fun—make FF a pop art delight.  Their collaboration on the full-page map of the Baxter Building is truly exceptional, the finest panel of the series thus far (below).

The biggest development in "Save the Tiger" is Scott Lang, the overwhelmed, still grieving, media-scrutinized new leader of the New Four.  He's woken up from a nightmare of his dead daughter Cassie by D.O.O.M.H.E.R.B.I.E.S., retreats into the bathroom in his Johnny Storm pajama pants for a little privacy, and finally descends into the chaos of the dining hall for breakfast, only to discover Darla Deering's latest celebrity invasion of privacy.  Her phone's been hacked by the Yancy Street Gang, a band of guerrilla hackers now bent on making her life as miserable as they can.  His clever, ironic and entirely un-Reed-Richards solution gives her harassers a dose of their own unhappy medicine.  It's elegant and simple and exposes all their own "embarrassing poetry, bad pony photoshops, and dollhouse furniture databases" (FF #6: 18).

He's even getting more comfortable with the kids.  It has to be the single strangest gender revelation of all time:

"Brothers.  I have this thing, and now you will have it as well.  It will be ours, and we will find out what ownership of this thing means.  I have a girl inside of me.  I tried to be a boy like you, but there is no boy here.  And I do not wish to be what I am not any longer."  (9)

His response at seeing a newly "dressed" Tong strolling down the hall with her brothers is so humorously understated, a combination of surprise and not-surprise:  "Is that a thing we're doing now?"  Meanwhile, Jen tries to take Ahura home to the other Inhumans, though they seem unhappy with the disappearance of Medusa.  To aid, apparently, in their search for her, they lend the New Four Lockjaw.  But while they're gone, Dragon Man begins to suspect there's something fishy happening with Medusa and the disappearance of Bentley-23, since several of the H.E.R.B.I.E.-Doom hybrids seem to have been intentionally disabled by her hair.  Their sudden and dramatic relocation into the Negative Zone would seem to help validate some of his fears.

Oh, and they have a H.E.R.B.R.U.M.B.A., because that's the most amazing thing ever to have been created.

[June 2013]