Wayne would only bring me one comic book this week. Luckily, it's a good one.

Tom Brevoort says:

And this week, [JMS] takes this sort of coordination one step further, as this week's issue of FANTASTIC FOUR meshes together gear-like with the events of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #534, depicting events taking place in the same general area at the same time from two different points of view. Either book can be read separately, but if you read 'em together you'll get an even better picture as to what's going down. This is the sort of tight crossover coordination that older fans remember from previous events like the Cask of Ancient Winters story in THOR, or the INFERNO crossover in the X-books.

Actually, it was closer to the Avengers Annual 14/Fantastic Four Annual 18 crossover, where the same story was told from two different perspectives, but I appreciate the coordination (granted, the same guy is writing both books). I need to read them again together to see exactly how everything ties together (for example, does the Spidey/Cap fight take place before or after both sides stand there talking to the Thing?), but this was a good issue regardless. It's nice to see some supervillains taking advantage of the chaos of Civil War, and JMS has a good handle on the psychotic (Mad) Thinker and the Puppet-Master, throwing in some cute psychology talk to disarm the "villains always betray each other" cliche. Interesting, and very in-character, development for Ben Grimm, as well.

The cover art shows the Thing looking like his movie counterpart, which i think looks terrible, but the inside art uses his classic design, so for once i'm glad that the cover artist isn't drawing the interior.

P.S. Do people really look back fondly on Inferno?

i know they did it so that you could read one book without the other, but i don't appreciate so many pages devoted to printing the same thing that was in spider-man pretty much exactly. especially considering that today's comics take half a second to read what with the bigger panels and the smaller number of dialogue bubbles per panel, yet they cost more.