Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, investigates a baffling case of missing persons on New York City’s Yancy Street, while a specter from the nightmare realms beyond haunts his tormented dreams, in Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir. When a gifted singer disappears across the alley under mysterious circumstances, Ben Grimm dons a fedora and trenchcoat and scours the city streets, in a pulp-fiction one-shot from Marvel Comics and storytellers Ron Garney and Gerry Duggan. Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir turns the tables on the inquisitive Thing when he ferrets out a supernatural suspect and pries open the vault to his innermost fears.
Ben Grimm, the rock-covered gargantuan known, colloquially, as the Thing and a founding member of the Fantastic Four, has traveled the eerie wastes of Annihilus’ Negative Zone to the boundless expanses of interstellar space, defending Earth and its kind from Galactus the Devourer, the arcane ambitions of Doctor Doom, and the depredations of the Skrulls. With might to rival even that of the Incredible Hulk, the Thing maintains the enduring facade of a dispassionate champion but childhood trauma and heartbreaking loss, as well as the tragic and inhuman metamorphosis that overcame him in a cosmic storm with his companions, the Fantastic Four, consume his subconscious. Despite his persistent denials of lingering regret and loss of identity, in Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir, the fatalistic Thing confesses, “Ben Grimm went to space, but he never really came back.”
Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir, from artist Ron Garney, writer Gerry Duggan, and colorist Matt Milla, is a stylish and spellbinding tale starring Aunt Petunia’s blushing blue-eyed nephew that begins with ominous tidings — “there’s something sinister looming in the shadows of Yancy Street.” Ben Grimm and his wife Alicia Masters, a blind sculptress who sees not a monster but a soulmate in the misshapen Thing, are swept up in a hardboiled account of abduction and the unnatural when their Yancy Street neighbor, a virtuoso singer vanishes without a sound. Gumshoe detective Grimm’s sleuthing leads him to seek counsel with Doctor Strange, when the waking world becomes a bleak, nightmarish reality and a spectral foe, that feeds upon despair, turns the screw.
The rain-slicked streets and vague underworld threats of noir fiction fit well within the familiar frames of the comic format and Marvel Noir has crashed jazz joints in Harlem with Luke Cage and explored post-war intrigue with the web-slinging Spider-Man. Through innumerable adventures with Marvel’s First Family, the Thing has vanquished the universe’s most daunting adversaries but his unconquerable fear, that happiness perishes by his own hand, torments him long after the dust has settled on the field of combat. In Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir, a vampiric spirit that thrives on the lament of the living savages the Thing in a brutal and hallucinatory dreamscape, a nightmare drawn from Ben’s own dread and self-apprehension.
- Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir #1
- Writer: Gerry Duggan
- Artist: Ron Garney
- Colorist: Matt Milla
- Cover Art: Ron Garney
- Ben Grimm throws on his hat and overcoat to solve a mystery that’s come alive right out of his nightmares. What is Dr. Strange’s nemesis D’Spayre doing on Yancy Street?
Fantastic Four: Grimm Noir, a one-shot from Marvel Comics hits the spinner rack this Wednesday.
