Trapped in the Negative Zone with Franklin and Val, beseiged by monsters, Ben and Johnny are scrambling to get back home before a cosmic anomoly with the power to consume everything swallows Manhattan.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is an American playwright, screenwriter, and comic book writer best known for his work for Marvel Comics and for the television series Glee, Big Love, Riverdale, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. He is Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics. Aguirre-Sacasa grew up liking comic books, recalling in 2003, "My mom would take us out to the 7-Eleven on River Road during the summer, and we would get Slurpees and buy comics off the spinning rack. I would read them all over and over again, and draw my own pictures and stuff." He began writing for Marvel Comics, he explained, when "Marvel hired an editor to find new writers, and they hired her from a theatrical agency. So she started calling theaters and asking if they knew any playwrights who might be good for comic books. A couple of different theaters said she should look at me. So she called me, I sent her a couple of my plays and she said 'Great, would you like to pitch on a couple of comic books in the works?'" His first submissions were "not what [they were] interested in for the character[s]" but eventually he was assigned an 11-page Fantastic Four story, "The True Meaning of...," for the Marvel Holiday Special 2004. He went on to write Fantastic Four stories in Marvel Knights 4, a spinoff of that superhero team's long-running title; and stories for Nightcrawler vol. 3; The Sensational Spider-Man vol. 2; and Dead of Night featuring Man-Thing. In May 2008 Aguirre-Sacasa returned to the Fantastic Four with a miniseries tie-in to the company-wide "Secret Invasion" storyline concerning a years-long infiltration of Earth by the shape-shifting alien race, the Skrulls,and an Angel Revelations miniseries with artists Barry Kitson and Adam Polina, respectively. He adapted for comics the Stephen King novel The Stand.
In 2013, he created Afterlife with Archie, depicting Archie Andrews in the midst of a zombie apocalypse; the book's success led to Aguirre-Sacasa being named Archie Comics' chief creative officer.
I really like the plot of this one, and it's directly relevant to the Fantastic Four portion of the Secret Invasion main title. The art isn't bad at all, either, though the Alan Davis cover is a bait-and-switch (Barry Kitson handles the interiors, who is just fine). That's a pretty standard practice in comics, and has been for decades, but I'm a fan of Davis on interiors. Pretty cover, though. Recommended read for anyone following the Secret Invasion tie-ins.
Johnny fights Lyja, who was impersonating Sue, and goes over his past loves, always crazy...Nova, herald of Galactus, Namorita, of Atlantis, Crystal the Inhuman, and Lyja! Long lost Skrull lover of Johnny...
Franklin gets a great idea how to get out of the NZone...go to the Prison Reed and Tony made during Civil War...
Lyja and Torch work together but she's passed out from strain...