Wasn't bad at all. Quite enjoyable. But instead of feeling the title is crowded with excellent ideas, I feel that it is just a waste of potential ideas. Instead of feeling filled with lots of story, it feels lacking, like there could be so much more. Empty and shallow, not crowded at all.
I liked the Argiopes, even though they make no sense. Where were they in #21? They didn't show up when Ben punched the T-Rex, or when the Chrono-Bandits threatened to kill the first human-fish-thing. They also don't stop the F4 from actually changing history at all. So their function is to stop threats to the reality fabric, but they won't stop time travellers changing time. Surely altering history and the future is a threat to the reality fabric worth stopping? Inconsistent if you ask me.
And I've yet to care about the zombies. To me, they're a half-baked idea being taken too far.
Also, I reckon the Super Skrull is the F4 in some way. Either one of them from New World, or all four melded together. Perhaps even Doom. We'll see.
As for Greg Land - I particularly liked the all-human line up of the F4 and Doom prior to the accident. I thought they looked good. Especially Doom and Ben.
President Thor giving everyone super powers was a nice idea, and the New World seems interesting.
The main problem I had was the actual plot.
While nice enough, it seems I might be the only one finding it a little... manipulative.
Ben Grimm is on the verge of suicide. He cries himself to sleep every night. He tries to kill himself but can't think of a way to do so. Everyone treats him like crap all the time. Johnny plays tricks on him.
So the most powerful emotional scene for this guy whose life is a living hell is when he's sitting on a park bench crying to himself because Johnny played a rather obvious trick on him.
Why didn't Millar go all the way? He says he's plotted his run out very carefully, yet we've never seen the reality spiders before, why hasn't Ben, during his fights with Namor and the zombies, shown a prediliction towards dying? His attempts at suicide could've been covered up by seeming acts of self-sacrificial bravery. Every life or death fight he's been in would've been his chance to end it, yet totally portrayed through subtext of his actions, so that when #27 comes around and Ben admits he's suicidal, we know this because he's ALREADY been so subtley trying to do so for the past 6 issues. That would be a great moment.
But why didn't Millar go all the way with just this issue; why didn't he show us the trials Ben had to go through to GET to the party? Why not put it all throug Ben's POV? Show him getting the taxi, which breaks, him having to walk, spending all his dough, just to get there. And show us all this AFTER we've seen how much this party, being around Johnny and his super-hot glamour friends, means to Ben. And we realise the party's a joke when Ben does - and not before (something I felt killed the scene).
Instead of scenes of Zombie beer and the police having a go at him, why not really explore what it's like to BE Ben, explore what it really means to be trapped in this monstrous body and what it means to be so depressed as to honestly try to kill yourself. Why not have us see him try to kill himself since he thinks Reed's given up on testing on him? We watch him try to kill himself, but he doesn't know how. We see him continually dropping subtle hints to Reed, asking for help to end his life, none of which Reed gets, and it looks like (since we're seeing this through Ben's eyes) that Reed's just stopped caring about curing Ben at all. The issue then could culminate in any of the following ways -
1) Ben, totally at his wit's end (can't live, can't die), hears that the other three have been thinking about using the time machine to cure him. Deciding not to wait, Ben takes the matter into his own hands and travels back in time and alters history. It results in him being cured, but Reed and/or Johnny are now "The Thing" in his place. Would Ben now treat Reed/Johnny with the same cavalier attitude they treated him? Would he treat them even worse? Would Ben give up his own happiness for them? The most bitter pill would be even if he did return to being the Thing to spare Reed/Johnny, they'd never know.
2) Ben, as above, uses the time machine and it results in President Thor's Super-Earth with everyone having powers - EXCEPT Ben. Which is worse? To be a monster among men, or a man amongst gods?
3) Ben, becoming more and more numb to the world as he finds it harder to feel anything anymore, starts become a lot more carless and destructive to the point where, with his inability to live beside humans properly, coupled with the bizarre adventures he has with the F4, Ben soon becomes unable to tell what exactly is real anymore, resulting in him creating an incident like the Hulk incident in such a desperate attempt to FEEL something. When finally subdued or possibly even killed, Reed's guilt propels him to travel back in time on his own, ignoring Sue and Johnny and Professor Storm's protestations to cure Ben before all this happened.
4) Ben, desperate for release from his life, tries to use all the bizarre weapons lying around that Reed's made, but he can't do so. They don't work. So Ben hits on an idea. They have four evil parallel zombies in the Baxter building. And he breaks into their jail cell so that they will eat and kill him. Now, either they do, and Reed's guilt propels him to alter history OR they don't. Instead they escape. They kill Storm, the soldiers in the Baxter building, Johnny, Reed, and Sue. They take over the Ultimates. They cause millions upon millions of deaths in an hour. And that is when Ben decides to travel back in time and fix the mistake (and his own appearance) as best as he can, and on his own.
The last one would also set up the zombies as even more of a threat if them being released in #30 is to be such a big deal. It'd be a two-fer.
The whole issue could've been a really powerful exploration into Ben's life instead of the well-meaning shallowness we got here. Greg Land sold it with his emotive work, but Millar seemed, to me at least, to be dragging his heels.
The whole arc is propelled by the mixed feelings of depression and guilt Ben's situation creates, and the more powerfully that is set up, the more powerful the entire arc will be, and I think Millar did the bare minimum. As it is, I don't feel time travel is the only option, but that it's a contrived way to get "President Thor" going. The alternative side of the story - what happens if they don't cure Ben (suicide, guilt, etc) - isn't set up enough to make me truly believe that potentially altering human history and giving up their lives is an option they'd honestly carry out with such conviction. Part of me thinks it would've been superb if Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Professor Storm were all creating huge probability schematics to work out EXACTLY what would happen if Ben wasn't the Thing and then trying to work out how they could alter the timeline safely, if only a precursor for stopping other things like 9/11, Bush becoming President, and with each new thing changed, they become more and more ambitious delving deeper and further into the past until they decide, maybe Jesus being around was a bad thing... or that Jesus showing up in the 13th century would be better. But then, that would be a whole different arc.
anic: I dunno but there are spiders and they're hanging above them and they sound dangerous. But they're talking about changeing the accident because of Ben. Reed returns to his time and calls Sue. 
