It’s been what seems like years in the making, but Mark Millar’s fumetti-turned-regular comic has finally hit the shelves, and it’s really, gloriously off the mainstream beaten track, with a kind of Kickass-meets-Marvels feel to it.

It’s immediately obvious why this was originally envisioned as a photo-comic - it takes place in the “real world” of, ostensibly, 1985, where kids read Marvel comics and there aren’t any superheroes or supervillains. Instead, the story follows Toby, a child of divorced parents who’s turned to comics to help him deal.

The plot, which sees Toby discovering that the Marvel supervillains might have arrived in “our” world has an interesting undercurrent that suggests it might just all be in his head. After all, he’s suffering from depression and stress, and turned to the comics to escape reality for a while - perhaps that’s actually what’s happening to him? How much that theme gets played with in future issues will certainly be of great interest.

There’s something remarkably refreshing about reading this kind of street-level, emotionally-driven comic from someone like Millar, who has been shoving out action-blockbusters of a ridiculous scale for years now. In fact, confining this story to four issues shows remarkable restraint, and I’m going to be interested to see how Millar actually pulls it off.

Tommy Lee Edwards’ art is infinitely more expressive than a Fumetti would’ve been, with a muted pallette and and incredible attention to detail. There’s a lot going on in the background of this comic and you could examine some panels for hours. The one time it doesn’t really work is a splash towards the end where it’s not entirely clear what’s going on - I get the sense of it, but not the details.

There are a few anachronistic-feeling elements - Millar’s vision of a 1985 comic shop seems designed to critique the current state of the industry rather than reflect the genuine attitudes at the time. And hey, Cerebus and Love and Rockets references! It makes things feel a little like “That 80s Comic,” which is a bit distracting. There are a lot of timeless elements to the narrative, though, and one wonders why 1985 was chosen as a specific start point. Is it merely for nostalgic purposes or is there something more to it, somehow? It’s the only element of the book that didn’t immediately win me over, which is a bit of a concern when it’s the, er, title…

Even so, in reading the book to review it, I’ve gone from being largely disinterested to oddly curious. It’s certainly a preferable follow-up to Millar’s Ultimates than his “more of the same” run on Fantastic Four is, demonstrating increased range and unique vision. It’ll be worth watching to see whether it stumbles with the second issue as Kick-Ass did to some degree, but as an first issue, it’s really got my attention.

Kick-Ass #1 launched amid such a massive wave of self-aggrandising hype and viral marketing that yours truly managed to remain blissfully unaware of its existence until about three days before it was released. This, naturally, demonstrates just how perfectly qualified I am to write a comics review column. Anyway, once it had been pointed out to me, the names were of course enough to draw me in – Mark Millar may have his critics, but you simply don’t ignore the man who wrote The Ultimates; while John Romita Jr. remains, for me, one of the absolute greats of the business.

So it was pleasing all round when that first issue turned out to be such tremendous fun. Millar’s clearly working very firmly in that “obnoxious” mode of his, but as the whole thing is comparable to Nextwave in terms of a writer cutting loose and fully indulging their sense of humour, tongue wedged firmly in cheek, for once it actually fit rather well. It’s a shame, then, that the now-much-anticipated second issue has turned out to impress me rather less.

It’s not that there aren’t neat moments. It’s just that the first issue, though not as original as it thought itself, was something of a breath of fresh air, and the consequences of Dave’s first attempt at superheroism were genuinely shocking. Here, though, after being shown his rehabilitation and recovery from his injuries, we know that despite his assertions to the contrary, it’s only a matter of time before he gets back into costume. And sure enough, so he does – but despite the entire story being narrated from his point of view, we never feel like we’re really getting inside Dave’s head, to discover just why he’s persisting with this after everything that’s happened. One simple line of dialogue – “The beast was friggin’ in me, man” – isn’t really enough to explain how he suddenly goes from “Never again” to being back pounding the streets.

Once he’s back in costume, of course, it’s even easier to see exactly where things are going – and, again, so it proves, with a more successful attempt at vigilantism seemingly vindicating his decision to get back on the horse. But part of the problem with following such a straightforward set of story beats is that, so far at least, Dave isn’t really a hero you find yourself rooting for. It’s possible to empathise with his general nerdiness, and I suppose he is driven by a desire to do something of genuine worth – but on the other hand, he’s a bit of a pillock. And for all the hype about this being a “realistic” book about someone trying to be a superhero… well, the idea of a recently-recovered spinal injury victim single-handedly taking on a group of thugs and winning means that the book is still rather more rooted in comic book rules than it perhaps feels it ought to be.

It’s still a very well-made comic, of course - the writing is brazenly confident, and JRJr couldn’t do poor work if he tried. And hey, it’s hard to argue with that front page tagline. But if there aren’t going to be any further twists in the story of Dave going out and kicking the crap out of people, then I’m going to lose interest fairly quickly. It’s the expectation that Millar surely has a lot more in his pocket, though, that’ll keep me reading for now.

It’s not often I talk about covers, but then it’s not often that I enjoy a cover concept I have on Fantastic Four. The tagline for the title has been “the world’s greatest comic magazine” for years. Now it actually looks like a magazine - a celebrity lifestyle magazine at that, with the story events trailed as headlines. It’s not like similar things haven’t been done, but F4 is certainly doing the most modern take on the concept, and nicely plays up the Four’s status as celebrity superheroes which is an aspect of the characters that’s almost unique in the Marvel universe.

As you might expect, putting Millar and Hitch on the Fantastic Four means that it’s got undeniably shades of the (real, not Loeb) Ultimates running throughout it. That said, Millar appears to be trying something new. Instead of the damaged, dark look at superheroes, Millar is trying to beat Grant Morrison at his own game, revealing a concept so crazy that the last place I saw it was an episode of Pinky and the Brain. Reed’s ex-girlfriend, the Claremont-created Alyssa Moy (making a welcome return) has been building… a replacement Earth. A 1:1 scale model of our own planet, ready to evacuate humanity to. Now, leaving aside the science of this - surely, if they can build a new Earth, they could repair our own - it looks like there are going to be some amazingly big ideas coming out of Millar’s run. A substantial portion of the issue is devoted to merely discussing the specifics of how such an evacuation might be made to go smoothly - maybe this discussion is telegraphing later plot points, maybe not - it works because it’s simply an interesting read in itself.

While Ben warns Reed about letting Alyssa get to him too much, Johnny is meanwhile having his own women problems, getting rather too close for comfort with a new super-villainess. Johnny’s girlfriends have often provided brilliant source material for F4 stories, and this one looks like it’ll be no exception. I’m not even clear on her powers or name yet, but I’m already interested in who she is, and it’s always a good feeling when someone creates a new character that doesn’t seem tedious.

Hitch’s art is, as ever, nothing short of amazing. Although I find myself disliking his specific character designs for Reed, Johnny and Sue, the detail and storytelling is spectacular. It’s not quite as fresh as it was when he came to the Ultimates, but it’ll never be disappointing. Few artists can carry a double-page spread well, but Hitch is one of them.

The only problem I have with the issue is that Sue isn’t even in it. Admittedly, you can’t always cram every character into an issue of Fantastic Four, but it feels a lot more like it’s being paced for the trade, which given Millar’s insistance that it won’t be collected for at least 18 months, is a bit self-defeating… Still, it’s top-quality comics, as if that was ever in doubt. Millar’s F4 is a refreshing take on the characters, playing down the superheroics in favour of the fantastic. A must-buy.

Kick-Ass is one of those comics that paints itself as a realistic depiction of superheroes. It’s a trend that many will argue began, and should’ve ended, with Watchmen. Still, even Watchmen’s premise was fairly forgiving - it was a realistic take on a superhero universe as much as superhero characters. Kick-Ass goes one step further, asking what happens when someone in OUR universe - the real world - tries to be a superhero.

As you can imagine, the answers are fairly simple, and they involve some poorly thought-out violence, a lot of swearing, and a teenager with too much time on his hands. It’s gloriously, painfully bleak stuff. The main character cuts a familiar figure - a comic-obsessed teenager who spends his time jacking off to internet porn and praising Joss Whedon to his friends. I feel lampooned already.

Issue #1 is, naturally, an origin story: David Lizewski is a nobody. After his mother dies of a brain aneurysm, he lives alone with his father, playing video games and reading comics. There’s nothing special about him, no unreasonable trauma in his upbringing, he just can’t understand (and if you ask me, quite reasonably so) why people want to be Paris Hilton and not Spider-Man. The thing that separates him from all of us is that he’s got exactly the right combination of time, boredom and stupidity to take it to the next level. Putting on a wetsuit with a facemask, he goes out looking for crime. For a while, he’s enjoying it, even if he finds nothing. When he eventually tackles a gang of grafitti artists, things go south pretty as fast as you’d expect - he’s beaten up, shivved and left for dead.

And let me tell you this: it’s all hilarious. Seeing Romita really go to town on the violence levels is, in itself, worth the price of entry. He’s been drawing castrated super-hero books for so long that you can practically feel the glee dripping off the page like the blood he’s drawing when David smacks a gang member in the face with his bat. Millar has his flaws as a writer, but he’s definitely managed to rein in his wilder tendencies - in David, he’s created a character who, far more than someone like Peter Parker, represents the everyman. I’m sympathetic with his directionless, entertainment-obsessed plight. The script, though, is where Millar really shines, and the last line of the book is what sells me on the next issue. I hesitate to spoil, but if you’re undecided it sums up the tone of the book perfectly: ”Two broken legs, my spine crushed, and dressed like a fucking pervert. My dad was going to kill me.”

When a big-name writer/artist team takes over a long-established book, it’s always important to strike a balance between keeping the existing fans happy, but making the series accessible for the spike in new readers that their appointment will bring, in the hope of keeping as many of them as possible. As someone who’s never really engaged with the Fantastic Four at any point, but drawn by the curiosity of Millar and Hitch tackling a monthly, main-universe title together for the first time, I naturally fall into the latter camp. So as far as I’m concerned, there are two questions – is it accessible enough to enjoy without prior knowledge, and will it keep me around beyond the first arc (or even the first issue)?

The answer to the first is a resounding “yes”. Say what you like about Millar, but he’s a good storyteller who can be economic with the necessary bits of exposition – even a reader unfamiliar with the most basic tenets of the FF setup is informed, over the course of the issue’s dialogue, that the family are beloved celebrity superheroes, Reed and Sue are married, Johnny is Sue’s brother, and Ben is “that guy [Reed] disfigured in that cosmic ray accident”, in simple and effective fashion. Beyond that, the issue feels like something of a slate-clearing – I had no idea of the team’s post-Civil War status (the last I’d seen, Sue and Johnny were leaving), but beyond a token mention of the marriage being on rocky ground, this is very much a jumping on point with the status quo as “classic” as can be. I guess this might be as galling to long-term readers is Brand New Day is to Spidey fans (well, not quite as galling, but you get what I mean) – but for a newbie like me, it works just fine.

Admittedly without being particularly up on my FF knowledge, I’ve always seen the inherent style of the book as revolving around comedy/drama family interactions, and… well… fantastic scientific wizardry and concepts. Millar may not exactly be Warren Ellis when it comes to technobabble, but he certainly squeezes in plenty of the latter, from a time-travel opening scene to the arc’s main plot of a “nuclear bunker”-esque second world for the planet to be evacuated to. And there are enough smirksome moments to carry it along – a couple of good lines from Ben (although, why is he the only person in the entire Marvel universe to have that particular accent?) and a brief appearance from Johnny the main highlights. Millar even gets to indulge his customary habit for redefining the role of a “superhero team”, with the subplot of Sue (and the Wasp and She-Hulk) setting up a group to deal with the aftermath of “superhuman incidents”.

Hitch’s work here, one of the other main draws beforehand, is solid rather than spectacular. There’s something of a rushed feel to quite a few panels, meaning that even though the character design is strong all-round (particularly with regards to Reed and Sue), it suffers from inconsistent application. You get the sense that he’s aware that, on a book like this (i.e. one which has to come out every month), people would rather have his work be a little off-key than suffer through lengthy delays for Ultimates-level precision. His real strength, though, remains in his ability to draw the “big” images with a good level of technical detail - and you suspect Millar will be giving him plenty of those in the coming months. Speaking of Ultimates, meanwhile, purists may scoff at the redesigned costumes, but I think they work well; and the same can be said for the new cover dress, its “magazine”ish stylings well-suited to the FF’s status as celebrities.

All-in-all, it’s a decent first issue, that never blows you away but gives you enough to keep you reading (I wonder, though, if subsequent issues will feature movie references as blatant as the Back To The Future III-style opening sequence, or indeed a closing page that seems to owe more than a passing debt to the Hitchhiker’s Guide film). Like I say, I can’t speak for the die-hard FF fan - but they’ve at least succeeded in making me vaguely interested in the characters. I don’t know if it would survive the sort of delays that plagued this team’s last work (and I know everyone keeps mentioning that - but it is a point worth making), but for now, it’s got an old-fashioned, Marvelish superhero feel to it - perhaps moreso than anyone who underestimates Millar might have expected from him - that’s enough to keep me onboard.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

You know what you hardly ever see in “Big Two” superhero comics any more? Genuinely new characters. By that, I don’t mean new members of supporting casts, new members of team books, or new characters that have taken on the role, costume and/or legacy of an existing hero. I mean brand new superheroes with no connection whatsoever to any existing character in the universe, with a setup and supporting cast all of their own.

This is hardly surprising, of course, when you consider what happens to those sort of characters when they do actually show up. Case in point - Aztek : The Ultimate Man. This mid-nineties title was an excellent little series, with a strong lead character and conceit, some big ideas about putting a fresh twist on superhero storytelling, and a writing team that would nowadays be considered absolutely stellar – given that it’s Grant Morrison and Mark Millar. Yet it only lasted for ten issues, before the titular hero got a brief stint in Morrison’s JLA, and was finally killed off.

Which is a shame, because it’s actually among the best superhero output DC had to offer in the grim years of the mid to late 1990s. The setup – a man raised and trained from birth in an isolated community overseen by a shady corporation, and sent into the world with a helmet granting mystical powers in order to carry out an (initially unspecified) protectoral mission – sounds a bit hackneyed, but the Glaswegian duo used the series to give something of an outsider’s take on the then state of superheroics. And, much like James Robinson’s peerless Starman, quickly set about building a distinct setting and support cast while also integrating the character into the DC universe.

By issue three, plot wheels were well underway – no messing about with “decompression” here – and we open at the funeral of Bloodtype, a violent sociopathic “hero” in the early ‘90s Image mould, killed accidentally in a skirmish in the first issue. His funeral is attended only by villains, rather than heroes, and MozMillar use him – if a little unsubtly – to contrast with the morality of Aztek, who in his opening scene is seen attempting to find a non-violent solution to dealing with a gang of muggers. If you’re the sort of person who sees Superman as too “goody goody”, and have a distaste for the Silver Age feeling that’s being evoked, then you’re probably less likely to engage with the lead character; but he’s played very much as a fish out of water (a little overly so, in a somewhat clichéd scene that sees his alter ego out on a date and perplexed by the menu in a restaurant), and his own highly moral code is seen to cause problems in a world drenched in shades of grey.

The main antagonist of the issue is trademark Morrison – the former girlfriend of Bloodtype, once a hero but rebuilt largely in plastic by the CIA after an unspecified “accident” and now going by the name Death Doll. There’s an attempt to bring pathos to her character when she first appears, although by the time she gets to actually fighting Aztek she’s turned somewhat into typical ranting villain mode. Nevertheless, what we see once again is an examination of a comic book trope – here, villain created by extra-normal circumstance is given a vaguely human background, even though they’re not particularly likeable.

Interestingly, the series also made use of Watchmen-esque text pieces at the end of every issue in an attempt to flesh out the fledgling background – the one here taking the form of a review of a biography of Vanity City’s founder – and it’s a neat touch, although one that ultimately proved futile once the series crashed and burned. Meanwhile, if there’s one thing that does let the title down, it’s the art, which while passable enough, falls very much into the DC house style of the time (comparable to Howard Porter’s JLA work), and while there’s a good sense of character design, it’s dragged down by some weak storytelling at points.

Nevertheless, Aztek remains a series well worth tracking down, even though the issues lead more to a “what could have been” point than managing to tell a full and satisfying story. It’s a largely forgotten moment in the careers of its two writers – but it’s very much indicative of the steps that both would take over the decade that followed.