Every week, writer Warren Ellis descends into the Whitechapel forums at the site of his webcomic Freakangels, and delivers an ultimatum to the denizens thereof: craft a wild remake or remodel of some existing comic property. This week, he asked for The Fantastic Four:
You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR. It is issue 1 of this book.
You have been told that the comic is about four people who steal a spaceship, fly into space, get heavily irradiated by cosmic rays, and return to earth weirdly altered by their experience.
And that’s it. The bastards haven’t told you one more damn thing than that. Not a clue. They might all be women. It might be about the Indian space programme twenty years from now. For all you know this is a JG Ballard story, for christ’s sake…
It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of The Fantastic Four. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.
And it didn’t even take until the week was up for people to start paying attention to the results of his request. We, however, decided to wait until the deadline was up before presenting our personal favorites. We’ve got six more behind the jump.
The above was created by Paul Sizer.
This one is courtesy mojokingbee:
struthersneil’s was accompanied by a bit of story:
Energy entity discovers new friend in low Earth orbit. Energy entity greets friend in the universal language of Total Decomposition. Energy entity discovers, to its horror, that its new friend is not in any way equipped to handle Total Decomposition, being composed of many confusing and conflicting parts, some of which seem to have (screaming) minds of their own. Energy entity has a think, decides to put it back to together as best it can, then buggers right off before anybody discovers what it’s done.
Left to right, we have: Astronaut made of bits of an experimental shield generator. Astronaut made of ablative heat shielding. Astronaut made of booster rockets. Finally, at the bottom, an astronaut made of pure intellect wrapped in scrotum skin.
Alberto’s:
-3-‘s:
Newcomer Xiao Mao’s art also had a bit of a backstory:
Frustrated by the lack of space funding in each of their home countries, a group of four astrophysicists from ESA, ROSCOSMOS, NASA and CNSA decide to steal a decommissioned Soyuz and conduct the research they’ve always dreamed of on their own. After a month of floating in space and their research successful, the team returns to Earth, ready to face the consequences of interplanetary theft. However, as they walk through the crowd of onlookers which has gathered around their landing capsule, they can feel it. Without speaking a word to each other, each scientist knows that something about her has changed…
The whole thread, with even more great art can, and should, be checked out here.
