Fantastic Four #562

***This review is spoilerish. You've been warned.***

I like Between Stories. You know, the pause in the action, the issue where the characters take a breather in preparation for the next attack or crisis. Fantastic Four #562 is an issue full of Between Stories, and plenty promises to happen.

Of course, it starts with Sue Storm Richards's funeral. The kicker? Sue gives her own eulogy. One thing I don't get about this scene, though, is the fact that everyone seems to assume that the Future Sue in the grave is the Official Future Sue. There may be infinite Alternate Future Sues, branching off from Official 616!Sue, with permanent microscopic tracking devices. (I picture something that looks like a cladogram.) I guess that wouldn't make the mourning any less profound, though. (Imagine, speaking at what is sort of maybe your own funeral. Yikes.)

Okay, I have to move on to the other Between Stories contained within this issue, inasmuch as overthinking Marvel's time travel logic is never a good idea.

Ben is happy (really genuinely happy) for once. Five beautiful (Bryan Hitch deserves his reputation) pages are devoted to this. Can't argue with that. Ben needs all the genuine happiness he can get his mitts on. There promises to be more for him. But where is Alicia in all of this?

Dr. Doom is in jail, and he has a word of warning. Apparently there is a villain coming that gives even Doom chills. Is this something connected to Marvel 1985? I have no idea. I haven't read it. Anyway. Doom gets to be ominous. He's good at that.

Please do not let this be foreshadowing.

Finally -- and I've been recounting this out of order -- there is Valeria's super-genius intellect, which she has just recently revealed to the rest of the family. I like this concept. I like the possibility of a future genius Invisible Girl. And in current continuity, it opens up some interesting possibilities, throwing the "family dynamic" into more than the usual "flux". Also, Franklin is jealous.

Yeah. That can't be good.

The Franklin panel appears about halfway through the magazine, and nothing afterward -- not Doom, not Ben, not Crazy Powerful New Villain -- even comes close to matching the Holy Cow Factor.

Everything in the Millar/Hitch run has been connected so far. I doubt that will change, and I look forward to discovering how, exactly, the Between Stories dovetail into Stories Proper.