FF #7

"That Was the Worst Field Trip EVER!"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

"Of course I am in your head!  That's where your family lives!" (FF #7: 3)

Wizard's frustrated exclamation to an unimpressed Bentley-23 and a hypnotized Medusa is both profoundly true and disturbingly wrong-headed.  The coercion he enforces on Medusa is an inexcusable violation, the kind of controlling intimidation that complements his attempted emotional manipulation of Bentley-23.  It's an abuse that Wizard is incapable of recognizing for what it is.  It's also precisely the place family is made.  Few of the Future Foundation's residents are genetically related, but in the absence of the Fantastic Four, they have become a family.  The Wizard's unwise underestimation of these bonds is in "That Was the Worst Field Trip EVER!" his undoing; he brings the Future Foundation to the Negative Zone to demonstrate the frailty of its hold over Bentley-23, but instead it only motivates the most heroic side-effects of his mini-clone's time there.

Fraction's sensibility about family—i. e., that they come in any number of permutations—is welcome and well-meaning, but its delivery here is inordinately heavy-handed.  No doubt, Wizard's villainously assembled family unit—a controlling father, a brain-washed mother, a monster uncle (who "killed and ate" his family), and a clone—is a satire, but Wizard's pushy preaching about his "heteronormative cisgendered classification of family" (FF #7: 10) dulls its edge.  Instead, the issue's finest moment is Scott Lang's conversation with Onome, which (hopefully) brings some of Scott's anxieties about the children's welfare and the memories of his daughter those anxieties perpetually agitate to a head. 

"The world is big and dangerous sometimes, Onome.  But it's the only one we've got.  And it won't get safer if we live safer." (7)

Overall, the issue feels a little rushed—if full of fine character moments and beautiful artwork—and the resolution a little overly neat, but the charm of the Future Foundation children rallying behind a beleaguered Scott both against and in defense of Medusa is plenty to make it such a fun read. 

[July 2013]