Fantastic Four: World's Greatest by Mark Millar and Brian Hitch

Reed Richard's old flame, Alyssa Moy, returns from where she has been working in the Arctic with a plea for help from Reed Richards. She tells him that the world has only 8 years left to live, due to various pollutants and other problems. There is no way that Reed can solve the problem- what she needs is his help with a world that she and her colleague are creating on the other side of a dimensional gate- a world to mimic our world, but one with no war, no violence, and no crime.

Reed doesn't necessarily agree with her conclusions on the fate of the world, but he's willing to look at her data, and he thoroughly enjoys his tour of the world they have created on the other side of the gate. He can't agree to help her at this time, but he is going to check her data before he can get back to her.

Johnny, meanwhile, has moved out of the Baxter Building and started a rock band with some of his buddies. Said band will also be starring in a reality TV show. But he's just met an amazing woman who has been robbing banks in addition to boinking Johnny's brains out, so he's more than a bit conflicted as to what to do with her.

Sue has stuff of her own going on, like an attempt to join with other female superheroes and create a team. But when a being from the new world, a sentinel known as "Cap" and based on Captain America, meant to keep order in the new world, escapes and begins to attack the nuclear arsenals of both America and Russia, it's up to her and Reed to put Cap down and end its rampage. Sue feels that Alyssa has her eyes on more than Reed's mind, and turns out to be right. But when Doctor Doom escapes his confinement and is kidnapped by a group of heroes, The Fantastic Four will be drawn into a fight that began in the future, and has returned to the past to wreak havoc.

Is there any hope for the inhabitants of Future Earth? And will Alyssa succeed in capturing Reed's interest in more than her ideas, or has she underestimated his love for his wife? Will the revelation of the future events of the earth lead to it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, or will Reed's reknowned intellect find some way to prevent the future holocaust?

This was a rather strange book. The beginning, with a trip to the past by Reed, Sue, Ben and the kids trying to go to Disneyland on its opening day, reminded me a great deal of the 60's cartoon era FF, specifically, the one with Kang the Conqueror and going back to ancient Egypt through a time machine in the Great Sphinx. But the story just didn't grab me. It didn't seem to have a sense of cohesiveness that a truly great story should. Too many disparate elements that, while they may have been fit together like a puzzle in the end, just left me with an "enh" feeling.

Yeah, stuff happens and the team works together, but the story, I just wasn't feeling it. Sue and Reed, and even Johnny get most of the strokes from this story. Ben kinda gets lost and left out in the cold, even if he does get a new girlfriend out of the whole thing.

I was just not impressed by the story. There were too many elements that, even when later combined, just left me cold. And while there was a valid effort to make the new babysitter character someone whose death you could sympathize with at the end, it instead made me feel a shrug and "so?" Some nice story ideas, but not very good execution of those ideas.