I just finished the second and final trade of Mark Millar's run on Fantastic Four, Masters of Doom. What the hell? The first trade, World's Greatest, was excellent. The first story about NuEarth and the Cap robot was damn cool. The dialogue was just great, and Millar's treatment of the characters was definitive. He made Reed into the coolest person on the planet and demonstrated how much in love he is in with Sue despite their many, many problems. The story about the future visitors was also pretty damn cool. Normally I don't like alternate future stories but Future Hulk and Future Wolvie and Future Sue were damn cool characters. And they killed Galactus! Damn. The other cool thing is how Millar sets up an impossible situation where there's no way to win... only to come up with a truly ingenious solutation that was properly set up beforehand. The only complaint I had was Bryan Hitch's art, which I just find to be pretty much ugly. He draws nice vista shots, but he draws the ugliest women outside of Gary Frank, and the men don't look much better either. So anyway onto the "Masters of Doom" trade. It starts off with a couple of cool little stand-alone bits with the typical Millar wit and genius, all the while ominously setting up the incredible threat of the Master of Doctor Doom. But then we get to the final four issues finally introducing the Master and it just completely falls apart. They get a cool introduction, destroying Latveria. Then suddenly we cut to five years in the future where Doom is the savoir of the planet and knocked up Sue... lame. Then suddenly it turns out that was all fake... lame. Then suddenly the final two issues of this massive storyline are neither written by Millar nor drawn by Hitch. And there's a rushed anti-climactic fight that totally destroys all the setup going on for the entire storyline. What the hell happened? Why did they abandon the title? Why didn't this story play out longer and more epicly? I'd been looking forward to this trade for months and I was incredibly disappointed.
Millar co-wrote the final issues. Hitch departed because his mother got sick and then died in late 2008, which occupied the better part of his time for a while; by the time he was back to work at full speed, he had to start drawing Captain America: Reborn or else give up on that. I thought Stuart Immonen did quite a remarkable job of matching Hitch's style. As for longer, they actually extended the run by four issues beyond the originally-planned twelve; the "Masters of Doom" story seemed about the right length to me.
But the "Master" didn't DO anything. In the set up they show him effortlessly destroying universe after universe... then there's a quick bit of an army of Fantastic Four teams attacking them... and it's over. Aside from blowing up Latveria (again, set up before the FF meet him), he didn't actually do anything.