Fantastic Four: Grand Design

The Grand Design format—pioneered by Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design trilogy—finds its most audacious subject yet in Marvel’s First Family, and Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Scioli delivers a tour de force that compresses decades of cosmic history into a single, incandescent creative act.

Fantastic Four: Grand Design is not a retelling—it’s a full-scale reinvention. Over two oversized issues (later collected as a single trade paperback), Scioli distills the first decades of Fantastic Four history into a singular, electrifying vision. Where the original run passed through the hands of dozens of creative teams across generations, this version pulses with the consistency of a single artistic voice: Scioli writes, draws, colors, and hand-letters every page in the proud tradition of the sole author-cartoonist. The result feels less like a corporate reissue and more like a fever dream painted by someone who has absorbed the FF into his very bones.

The scope is cosmic, intimate, and everything between. From the fateful rocket flight that remade four lives forever through the arrivals of Doctor Doom, the Black Panther, Galactus, the Mole Man, and the Inhumans, Scioli threads it all into a cohesive tapestry that builds toward something larger than any single issue could contain. He reimagines the Baxter Building as a living nexus defending Earth against incursions from every conceivable direction—the Negative Zone, the Microverse, Atlantis, the depths of space. Each page turn peels back another layer of an interconnected universe as sprawling as Kirby and Lee’s original and as tightly controlled as a masterclass in visual storytelling.

Visually, the book is a revelation. Scioli’s dense page layouts, hand-rendered lettering, visible pencil strokes, and textured crayon-based coloring create a reading experience that stands entirely apart from the polished house style of modern mainstream comics. This is raw, alive, and crackling with the energy of a creator working at the full command of his craft. Critics praised the work for capturing the essential spirit of the characters while straining their relationships to the breaking point—testing whether Marvel’s First Family could truly hold together under the greatest pressure the cosmos can hurl at them.

Published by Marvel Comics in 2019, with a trade paperback collection released in 2020 and a new printing in 2025 timed to the Fantastic Four: First Steps film, this is a book built for both longtime devotees and newcomers ready to discover why the FF endures.

Perfect for fans of the Grand Design series, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s original run, auteur-driven superhero comics in the tradition of Walter Simonson, and anyone who wants to experience the magic of the Fantastic Four through the eyes of a modern master in full command of his powers.

Created by Tom Scioli.