COMIC BOOK REVIEW: FANTASTIC FOUR #569

To preface the following, I am a very avid reader. And one of the many things I read (and I do stress the R word) is comic books. My very first was Action Comics #434, May 1974 from what was then National Periodical Publications, now more commonly known as DC Comics (named for one of their earliest titles, Detective Comics). The following is a review of a book I recently read.

Now, on one hand, the outcome of the current Fantastic Four storyline "Doom's Master", had a couple of predictable conclusions
1. The person believed dead in the title turned out to still be alive.
2. The big event that the subplot had been building towards in the last few issues (the wedding of Ben Grimm, aka The Thing) didn't happen after all.

I am not surprised by these results, for this was Mark Millar's last issue as writer and the one thing he could not do was shake up the series' status quo for too long.
However, there were a couple of surprises along the way.
1. How the presumed deceased actually survived.
2. Why the big event in the subplot never happened.

Yet while overall this issue was an enjoyable read, I do have one major quibble:
WHERE WAS FRANKLIN RICHARDS?
If Millar wanted to focus on Valeria and develop the character during his tenure, no problem. But Franklin was absent without leave (or story explanation) for most of the last two issues, and nobody either within the story or on the editorial side of the page seemed to have noticed! Don't you think that despite everything going on, the parents (Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic and his wife Sue, aka the Invisible Woman) would have noticed the absence of their oldest child?
Hopefully the new creative team that takes over with issue 570 will be more alert about their cast.

The above is just my opinion folks. Would you like to see more (comic) book reviews? Just leave a comment either way.