Four No More?

There is much ballyhoo about the forthcoming demise of the "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine".  Personally I'm not much buying it, as with any fictional concept the members of the Fantastic Four can abide quite nicely in the calm of hiatus awaiting the moment for an even more ballyhooed return. Lord knows that comic book characters these days get killed month in and month out, so merely slaying the team within a fictional framework might not get the free publicity bang the powers at Marvel desire. But cancelling their "flagship title" seems to have done the trick.

I haven't followed the FF for many years now, pretty much since Marvel cancelled the original run of the comic to replace it with a cavalcade of reboots and revivals. In a modern comic book environment when books are rebooted every other year, getting the news that the venerable FF has been cancelled seems oddly moot. They've been cancelled already, a few times, but they always return. And they will again.
 

There seems to be lots of intrigue in this announcement, as if the "House of Mouse" overlords who now own the "House of Ideas" are manipulating the secondary rights of the FF to limit the ability of the current film-rights owners to garner a rich bounty. By making the the FF seem less profitable, it might shake the characters loose for reassignment back within the bulwark of the vast  and all-consuming engine which is Disney.

For my money it all seems to be a battle of the behemoths, two vast enterprises finagling the last erg of profit from the ideas of truly creative men who came before them. It all seems like a war which I care about far less than I'd imagine they'd hope.

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