2903: Fantastic Four Special #1 (2006)

So, I guess Fantastic Four are back. I don't pay close enough attention to current superhero comics to really claim to understand why they were gone or what they've been doing. I'm told they were gone for three years, but now they're back. Marvel has rebooted their series and their numbering so much over the years that sorting through all the Fantastic Four comics in the corpus was slightly annoying (I actually purchased a mid-1960s FF by mistake when I should have bought a volume three or four one - I was able to trade it for another book that we needed though, so it all worked out). This comics, #2903 in the corpus, is one of twenty-seven Fantastic Four comics that we own.

We have so many of these type of comics: comics where it is difficult to remember why there was a need for a "Special" rather than just a stand-alone issue of Fantastic Four, and comics that don't seem to be much recalled (we got this for less than a dollar, though it originally cost three dollars). 

The comic begins with a retro style on its first two pages that made me perk up but it then settles into what may well emerge as a generic Marvel house style of the 2000s when all the count is done. An awful lot of overlapping panels in this one, which is one of the more distinctive visual traits of this period. The single book-length story is about Reed Richards having dinner with Dr. Doom.