I will say this about Jonathan Hickman: He sure is daring when it comes to his choice of artist. He has the balls to ask Steve Epting to draw Fantastic Four, considering Captain America at the time was slightly higher then FF that was an accomplishment. But then he’ll go out of his way and let new or underused artists come in and take a go at it. Nick Pitarra has now become one of my favorites artists thanks to ‘The Red Wing’ and it seems like Hickman is doing it again by letting Juan Bobillo draw this new arc of FF. But sometimes experiments can backfire on you and while that might sound harsh with Bobillo coming up again in the same sentence as this, I hesitate to call this art enjoyable.

Juan Bobillo certainly has the talent, especially when you look at his wonderful backgrounds and creator designs. I absolutely love the scale of the Celestials and the Fish Kids are still hilarious to look at. What I also noticed, especially with this issue, is that Bobillo loves to have a lot of space in his pages. Sure there are borders from time to time; but look at the double page spread of the Celestials and you can just imagine the vast scope of the cosmos in the setting. It’s little touches like that that makes me see the huge potential in the guy. But then I see the absolute worst drawings ever of children before me and it almost destroys all the praise I was mustering up. You see his take on creatures or Dr. Doom (he’s covered in a mask so it’s fine) look really good but it seems as though he struggles to figure out how the actual human anatomy works. Faces are scrunched up, eyeballs sometimes don’t fit in the eyeholes of characters, and at times it’s just plain ugly to look at.

It’s a shame the problems with the art are too hard not to notice because the story is actually getting pretty good. I still see little reason why this couldn’t just be in Fantastic Four, and thus extending Hickman’s story a little further instead of bi-monthly, but what’s here is pretty good. I said it before but if the prospect of this title is to make Hickman write more of Doom then I could buy this title regardless who’s drawing it. I just love how bad ass and totally nonchalant Doom is with all these predicaments. The final page alone is more then enough proof to show why Doom is ultimately one of the best characters in comics today. Although having said that I was a bit thrown off by the ending cause it felt like another page was going to happen. The tiny, almost invisible logo to show it’s the end might need to be resized a bit next time.

If the art isn’t good, then I won’t be buying the next issue. That’s one of my mantras when it comes to buying comics and it pains me to say that FF is really cutting it close with me on dropping it. Juan Bobillo definitely has the talent and it shows in most of his designs. But it’s the character models that ultimately do him in and there are some really horrible looking children in this book. But the story is still pretty fun to read and the art, for the most part, is still solid. Still, if the book continues to look this hideous from a character design I might drop this book which I have yet to do for a Hickman comic.