Lesson Three: Tie Together Smaller Arcs with an Overarching Story

I recently finished reading Jonathan Hickman's run on the Fantastic Four, and it has me thinking about the role of overarching storylines that span multiple smaller arcs. When done well, an overarching plot can tie together a run that would otherwise seem fragmented and without direction. It also gives a writer the opportunity to create a more powerful and farther-reaching story, one whose planning is as impressive as the story itself.

Let's begin by taking a look at Hickman's Fantastic Four run with its intricate, multi-arc storytelling, and then compare it to a less-intentional counterpart: Zeb Wells's Amazing Spider-Man run.

Hickman begins his run in issue #570 by exploring an inter-dimensional secret society known as the Council of Reeds: a group of Reed Richards' who've come together from different dimensions to "solve everything". After a brief introduction, the Council is attacked by a group of Celestials, the cosmic gods from the Eternals comics. After narrowly fighting off the mad gods, Reed learns a startling truth: all the other Reeds in the council have left their family in the pursuit of solving the most important problems in the multiverse. Unwilling to accept the same as his fate, Reed abandons the council and returns to Earth.

This is the first arc in Hickman's run, and it does a fantastic job both of being a touching story about family and the pursuit of knowledge, and also setting up a future, overarching storyline - the Council and Celestials will return.

Hickman's run is extensive, but I think it's worth giving a rough overview of the main points to get a sense of the scale of his overarching narrative:

• The FF rediscover the Lost City of the High Evolutionary, which has been enticing Mole Man's Moloids to defect from his society in favor of their own.
• The Old City of Atlantis re-emerges from the depths of the sea, ruled by three kings each representing one of three different species. Namor, King of New Atlantis refuses to accept their sovereignty, revealing to Sue Storm that the three kings may not be as peaceful as they seem.
• Black Bolt, King of the Inhumans, has waged war on the Kree, the empire that first created the Inhumans hundreds of thousands of years ago. As it turns out, this war was prophesied at the time when the Inhumans were incepted, and precautions have been taken.
• Annihilus, conqueror of the negative zone, launched an attack on the Earth, forcing Johnny Storm to sacrifice himself to save humanity.

Each of these four story arcs is an intriguing story within itself, but what makes Hickman a masterful writer is the way he connects them together: the War of the Four Cities.

Valeria Richards, Reed and Sue's daughter, accidentally opens a portal which allows several members of the Council of Reeds to enter the main marvel universe. These alternate Reeds are determined to bring about the prophesied War of the Four Cities in order to gain access to the stores of energy within each. Their purpose? Create a super-weapon capable of destroying the Celestials.

Add in a few more subplots with Galactus, Nathan Richards, Reed's father from the future, returning to the present, and Valeria restoring Doctor Doom's intelligence in exchange for his help fighting the rogue Reeds from the Council, and you've got the most cohesive overarching storyline I've ever read. Just think about how much planning went into this story - that alone is impressive, irrespective of how good the writing itself is.

Also, take a look at this stunning art by Barry Kitson:

Let's compare Hickman's writing to a more recent comic run: Zeb Wells' Amazing Spider-Man.

Wells begins his run with a flashback to six months prior: a huge crater with a battered Spider-Man in the center crying out to the world. We soon discover that whatever this mysterious event was, it drove a wedge between Peter and MJ, Peter and Aunt May, and racked up a whole bunch of debt. It's an intriguing premise that showed potential at the time.

Unfortunately, as each smaller arc progressed, the overarching storyline was never further explored. Spider-Man gets in the middle of a turf war between Tombstone and The Rose, Norman convinces Peter to work for him and builds him a high-tech suit, Roderick Kingsley and Ned Leeds return as the Hobgoblins, and as of December 2022, Ben Reilly/Chasm is back for revenge in his Dark Web event.

Individually, all of these are mid-tier arcs - not great, but also not bad at all. The real issue is that Wells seems to have forgotten about the premise for his run in the first place! More likely, there's not enough behind that premise for anything more than a big reveal sometime in the future. But without consistently building up the overarching story, a final revelation will feel out of place and disconnected from the other, smaller storylines. Without being overly harsh on Wells, this Spider-Man run is really a great example of how not to write an overarching narrative in comics.

Hickman showed me the wonders of a storyline that makes 40 issues feel like a single arc, while Wells showed me the disappointing reality that most writers aren't able to plan their stories as intricately as necessary to pull off a Hickman. That may be the first use of the phrase "a Hickman", but I hope I've proved it's well deserved.