Fantastic Four #580 - Marvel

I just praised Jonathan Hickman on his story-telling abilities, and then . . I read this book. There were some really cool ideas presented in this issue, but . . the main story that everything is wrapped around . . in my opinion was just way to predictable and obvious. To me, the best part of this issue was the first 3 pages, and the last 7. In the middle we get a story about Arcade and the Impossible Man. I know! Boring! Right? Anyways, supposedly Arcade has reformed and he's opened a toy store with his theme being franchised commodities . . Super-heroes, and some Super-villains too, I'm sure. Anyways, his big focus right now is the Impossible Man. He's got this huge line of toys planned, with goals of making a lot of money . . legitimately, for both himself and the Impossible Man. He's even done the unthinkable and had the Impossible Man put a fraction of his essence into each of the toys, making them even more spectacular. The problem is . . Johnny shows up with Franklin and Leech not knowing that it's an Arcade front. Now, no matter what Arcade says, you just know that sooner or later he's going to crack and whip out the death-traps and toys. I mean, it's his schtick. So when it happens it's just way to predictable. However, it was interesting how Franklin, with Leech knocked out, and very upset about Arcade ruining their perfect day, uses his reality altering powers to take Arcade down. He actually does so pretty much single-handedly. But other than that, this middle part was just way to obvious. Anyways, the story in the beginning and the end is that the classroom of students that Reed has assembled has picked their first project. They've decided to tackle the problem of fixing Ben. As they see it, the Fantastic Four's power's are always either on or off. They all have that control, except for Ben. So they've devised a formula for helping that to happen. The problem is, had he been given the formula much earlier it probably would've afforded him better control. But since he's been in this state for such a long time, the alternative . . human, is more of the alien now. So while this formula will do the trick, it's only going to allow him about 1 week per year of transformation. Ben's response to this terrible news? 'I'll get to be normal for a whole week every year? . . I'll take it!' We also get the pages that we've been getting recently catching us up on Nu-Earth's history. Apparently it progress' at a much faster rate of speed than our normal reality. We get 700 years of history here in 5 panels. It starts out at +515 years, and goes up to +1217 years. The only thing that confuses me is that there's always a panel in the middle that's labeled . . 'Nu-Earth - Real Time - Beyond the Distortion'. I'm not exactly sure what that means. But in that panel, it appears that there's an infinity of Ultrons that have built up over that time. Plus, we don't know yet what affect all of this history is having on our present Earth or story-line. Also, this issue didn't deal with all of these 'cities' that are coming to a head. I assume we'll pick up on that next issue. So . . overall I thought it was a good book. I just didn't particularly care for the Arcade story. But there were still some great ideas here. I thought Neil Edwards did a good job with the art.