(That’s what Ross’s graphic novel is, incidentally. Some of this is accelerated by the Disney Rot that infects every property the company buys and then micromanages to death-when was the last time you were truly hyped about a new Star Wars movie? Or Pixar? Or-and I’m genuinely sorry to remind you of this-anything involving the Muppets? The homogenizing impulse that has destroyed so much else that Disney owns has not totally eaten Marvel Comics yet, probably because, even if you’re hiring the hottest comics artist alive and working-a title to which Ross has at least some claim-it’s just cheaper to make a comic book.

But it has no Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, no uniting visual artist whose unmistakable style makes the individual installments worth returning for. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has its Stan Lee in Kevin Feige. (We’re not there yet! Even Eternals made $400 million.) Lately, the Marvel movies have felt as though they’re winding down, even as each of them grows more desperate to impart some vital bit of trivia that the consumer can carry to the theater on their next outing. The question is less whether Marvel’s grand experiment in interlinked superhero films can continue forever than how long it will take for the experiment to run through all of the MCU’s interesting configurations of living actors and familiar characters, and how long after that it would take for people to get sick of them. Actors and directors-and yes, even superproducers like MCU maestro Kevin Feige-get old, run out of ideas, and eventually die. That’s not a feat anyone can duplicate on the silver screen, as Disney demonstrated so forcefully with its horrifying computerized golems of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing in Rogue One. Alex Ross can make a Fantastic Four comic decades after Kirby’s death and it comes off as a tasteful homage because the characters whose lives he’s prolonging are drawings, not actual human bodies. By definition, the Marvel Cinematic Universe can’t last as long as the Marvel Comics Universe.

Fantastic four alex ross full circle