Having remembered writer Mark Waid's Fantastic Four run from the early 2000s, I was not only intrigued at seeing him take up work on the title again fifteen years later, but also surprised to learn that distinguished artist Neal Adams would also be aboard for Waid's four-issue series, which debuted in October of 2020.
I believe the last pages I remember seeing from Adams during his time at Marvel was his War Of The Worlds work from Amazing Adventures #18 in 1973. If I'm not mistaken, Adams' only work depicting the FF (three of them, at any rate) took place in Avengers #93, when a trio of Skrulls took their form to attack the assemblers (with Adams doing a few cutaway panels of the real McCoys in a subsequent issue). Having plied his craft with the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Inhumans, the FF would elude Adams for forty-nine years before finally landing on his drawing board as a full-fledged project--which was bound to make even those like myself, who had all but ceased reading new Marvel work, more than curious about the finished product.
This first installment of Waid's story is geared to build momentum for whatever challenge the FF will face, with much of it featuring the group in action against not one but two more immediate threats, the latter of which will be related to what is to come. The story's overriding theme, "antithesis"--literally, the opposite or contrast of one thing in relation to another--could mean anything at this point; the only thing we know for now, thanks to the cover, is that it will involve the Silver Surfer, who has returned to the service of Galactus. Obviously the Surfer is in bad shape, and the FF don't seem to be responsible for his condition--but we'll have to wait and see what we learn as things take shape.
As for that first threat, a character which fits that bill is surely Annihilus, the fiend from the Negative Zone who has once more broken through to our world with intentions toward conquest and death.
