My last post on Superior. I promise.

Mark Millar tends to write a lot about political issues, and even includes actual, real-life politicians within his comics (President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet appeared in both The Ultimates and Civil War, for example, President Barack Obama appears in Superior), and war often plays a big role in those comics. But, based on the comics he writes, I have a hard time discerning what sorts of politics Millar himself might hold, aside from being very pro-Millar and very pro-capitalism, particularly in that it can help enrich Millar.

Take Civil War, for example, which was discussed and even, to some extent, sold as a timely dramatization of the post-9/11 security vs. liberty debate as seen through the lens of Iron Man and Captain America punching each other.

Millar cast the security side of the debate as the bad guys, clearly aligned with the Bush administration, the first issue ending with a scene of a trio of Marvel's science dickheads—Iron Man, Hank Pym and Mr. Fantastic (who had just recently been outted in someone else's dumb comic as pro-Joe McCarthy)—promising to capture Captain America and force him and all the other recalcitrant superheroes to sacrifice their liberty in the name of security. They immediately start abusing the constitution, killing someone for resisting an unlawful arrest and even building a superhero version of Guantanamo Bay to indefinitely defer the likes of lawyer-by-day, superhero-by-night Daredevil.

So they're the bad guys, right? But in the last issue, the heroes of 9/11—a sort of Village People version of first responders—tackle Captain America and make him realize that he's the real villain, so he gives up, and Iron Man makes a smug speech about how extra-constitutional power is okay in this instance, because he's a smart guy who will do the right thing with it, so no one should worry.

In the security vs. liberty debate the book was supposedly about, all I could definitely tell about Millar was that he was in favor of Captain America surfing on jet fighters, Goliath getting killed by a robot clone monster and selling as many comics as possible by weird, random, almost-immediately reversed stunt plot points like Peter Parker revealing his secret identity to the world and the dead-from-cancer Captain Marvel appearing out of nowhere all of a sudden for some reason.

The politics of Superior aren't very clear, either, although it's not as concerned with politics as Civil War or any of Millar's Ultimates works have been.

There's just this one scene that sort of sticks out, like a rough edge from an early draft Millar forgot to smoothe out.

Superior, the Superman-analogue who was once a 12-year-old boy with multiple sclerosis named Simon who wished himself into Superman when a little talking monkey in a astronaut's uniform appeared and offered to grant him any wish, is talking to Chris, his only confidant:

Simon's mom was always praying that "America would get fixed again too." Simon/Superior thinks perhaps America really "needed" a superhero at that moment in time.

It's weird because those statements aren't really based on anything we see within the context of what has come before, nor are they really touched on later in the story, after he tells Chris he wants to start doing more to really change people's lives for the better.

Now, at almost any point in American history it's easy to imagine a person, especially a grown-up adult, saying that America needs to be put back like it used to be. It's an essentially conservative position, just by definition of the word conservative, but Simon/Superior never elaborates on what his mom thinks specifically needs fixed again: The economy? The war? Eroding social services and the safety net they provide for the poor? The loss of civil liberties to President Bush and Iron Man? Too much liberties for gays? Too easy access to birth control and abortions? A black guy being president?

No clue.

Prior to that statement, the only things Superior really does to help America are prevent accidents, usually in rather dramatic fashion—he catches a falling space station, he stops a speeding train with his bare hands (although it woulda been easier to just move the dude off the tracks before the train could hit him), he drags a lost Russian submarine to land, he carried off a nuclear power plant reactor as it was melting down, he threatened the bullies that picked on him and Chris and, we're told, he prevented every single accident and crime in New York City for three years.

Perhaps that was what was wrong with America, in his mom's view? Too many accidents and urban crime...?

After Superior meets with Obama to talk to him "about winning the war in Afghanistan," Superior goes ahead and does it solo in a single night's work (one suspects Millar doesn't have the greatest grasp of what the "war" in "Afghanistan" actually entails; here it is basically just a bunch of easily identifiable by X-Ray and telescopic vision Taliban members who can be easily captured and arrested by a Superman). The rest of his super-deeds take place in a two-page montage, in which he helps other countries, like preventing a earth quake in China and a flood of the coast of Australia, and brings "more food and volunteers in a single afternoon than citizens expected to meet in a lifetime..."

So perhaps that was what was needed in America? America needed to be the world's policeman, the world's fireman, the world's aid worker, but it needed to do so infinitely better than it had been doing...?

I don't know. I don't suspect Millar does either. It was just a few errant lines of dialogue setting up a tease about the nature of Ormon. But it's a strange reference that asks a question and then never provides an answer.

Meanwhile, Superior and "Trinity War"...

"Well, it looks like someone who writes for USA Today only read one miniseries that year," I thought to myself when I saw this blurb on the back cover of the trade paperback collection of Superior...and that was before I read it, and realized just how creative bankrupt and just how derivative of the Superman character and story the book really was. In essence, it's an elevator pitch for a high concept Superman Elseworlds story—"What if Superman were real?" with a pair of M. Night Shyamalanian twists thrown in (I wrote about Superior this week at Robot 6, if you'd like to read my take on it; given Man of Steel being in theaters now and the sequel to Kick-Ass, which is being produced by the dude who made the first Kick-Ass and has the movie rights to Superior, I thought it a good occasion to take a look at Millar's latest movie pitch-as-comic book series).

Anyway, after I read the book I was even more curious about that "best of the year" blurb on the back, and wondered if maybe Marvel hadn't unscrupulously edited something in a USA Today article to arrive at it; like, perhaps it was an interview with Millar, who said "I guarantee you: Not only is this the best mini-series I've ever written, but it's going to be the best mini-series of the year" or something Millar-esque like that.

So I did some Googling, and it turns out that that is really a real, genuine quote from a real, genuine writer for USA Today! In comes from his end-of-the-year/best-of-the-year piece from 2011, which you can read here.

The writer had this to say of Superior, which won his "Best miniseries" category:

Mark Millar is a master of off-kilter superhero comics—Wanted, Nemesis, Kick-Ass—and, with artist Leinil Yu, mines the theme of wish fulfillment in the story of a boy with multiple sclerosis who gets the chance to be his favorite do-gooder. The rub: The alien monkey giving him the powers is a demon, and the kid has to sell his soul to the devil to keep his new abilities. Everybody wants to be a hero, but Millar deftly explores the consequences of that gift

The only part I actually agree with in that paragraph is the plot-summary, and the last sentence is really hard to swallow. The price of being a hero? For protagonist Simon, it means either selling your soul to Satan to be a literal superhero, or not selling your soul to Satan in order to magically be Superman but instead remain yourself to be a figurative hero. For narrator Madeline Knox, it means potentially sacrificing a potential Pulitzer Prize for not taking advantage of a 12-year-old kid in a state of shock.

The only real hero who pays any kind of price is Simon's best friend Chris, who endures getting made fun of by some school bullies for hanging out with Simon.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any non-Flashpoint miniseries that came out in the calendar year 2011, so I'm not ready to offer a 60-title deep list of miniseries that were much, much better than Superior by being, you know, any good at all. I think it's worth noting that of the 35 categories the USA Today writer offers, all of 'em go to direct market superhero comics, or genre comics involving super-powers and/or super-science and/or supernatural elements, even the ones that say "non-superhero" in the category.

For example, the non-Marvel, non-DC super-stuff includes Image's Strange Tale of Luthor Strode (its writer, Justin Jordan, was named "Best new writer"), Gladstone's School For World Conquerers ("Best book you may not be reading") and Chew (artist Rob Guillory was the "best non-superhero artist"), IDW's Locke & Key ("Best ongoing series") and Dark Horse's Mignola-verse business (The fictional B.P.R.D. got "Best team, non-superhero category"). To use a media-to-media comparison as Tom Spurgeon often does when writers discussing "comics" focus entirely on a single genre, this would be a bit like a writer covering television for a national newspaper coming up with 35 categories and choosing to award 30 or so of them to network police procedurals, with the remainder going to shows that are about private investigators.

Then again, the headline was "From 'Flashpoint' to 'Fear Itself,' the year in comics 2011" (In other words, "From DC Comics' major, line-wide event comic book series to Marvel Entertainment's major, line-wide event comic book series, the year in comics 2011"), and he named Flashpoint—Batman: Knight of Vengeance #2 the best single issue of the year (that's the comic in which it was revealed that in an alternate reality where Bruce Wayne was shot instead of his parents, his dad became Batman instead and his mom became The Joker for some reason).

So given that pool of comics, I guess What If...Superman dressed slightly different and we called him "Superior" so as to not get sued by DC? might seem like one of the more daring comics concepts of the year, and certainly Yu's a pretty great artist compared to about half the scrubs who turned out a bunch of really shitty-looking Flashpoint art (To be fair, the Batman Flashpoint had some pretty great art in it, despite the silliness of the storyline).

Anyway, I was just amazed to see that something that I regarded as one of the worst miniseries I've ever read being singled out as the best of a particular calendar year by a writer with such a widely-read (if not exactly prestigious or reliable for astute criticism) venue.

It takes all kinds, I guess; even jerks like me.

Aside from writing about Superior, which I promise I'm almost done going on-and-on about (maybe one more short post and then I'll be done, I swear), I also wrote about the second official installment of DC's "Trinity War" crossover story for the second second official installment of my ComicsAlliance series "Trinity War Correspondence." Go read it, please (Or just click on the link; page-views are the coin of the realm).

And since we're talking about weekly contributions to Robot 6 and "Trinity War," you should totally check out Tom Bondurant's column on the first few installments, as it is better, more knowledgeable and more even-handed than, like, everything I write.

Millar, Superior and "The R-Word"

How can a reader tell when something written in a work of fiction represents the author's viewpoint and when it is merely dialogue the author is using to represent the viewpoint of his characters?

That's a tricky question to wrestle with, and, personally, I don't see any reason to ever assume the latter over the former with any degree of confidence.

That said, when an author has three very different characters use the same increasingly rarely used, no longer socially acceptable, completely un-PC term three times in the same relatively short story? Well, that at least can make a readers suspicious of the author.

I bring this up because I just read a trade paperback collection of Superior, the 2011, 7-issue Leinil Yu-penciled series that Marvel Entertainment published on their creator-owned/keep-Bendis-and Millar-happy-at-all-costs Icon imprint. It was written by Mark Millar, no stranger to having folks arch their eyebrows at the words of his narrators and characters and getting uncomfortable about the degree to which the characters speak for the author.

If you haven't read it—and you needn't—Superior is either a rejected pitch for a Superman comic that DC didn't like as much as Millar's Red Son, or it's an idea for a Superman story that Millar had but realized if he just changed some characters and costumes (here, extremely slightly) as he did with Wanted, he could get away with using DC characters for another publisher, and reap the financial reward of the book and/or the movie adaptation. (This isn't a review of the book; I'll get to that in the near future, but this one aspect struck me as so strange and made me so uncomfortable, I thought it worth noting in its own post before proceeding to the formal aspects of the comic and assessments of the overall quality).

This is the narrator of the book, the Lois Lane character Madeline Knox, who starts narrating about halfway through the first issue, but isn't actually introduced until this scene in the third issue:

While there's no indication of how old she is, it would be safe to assume by her profession—a popular, New York City-based television journalist and newscaster—and her success in that field that she's no younger than her mid-twenties, and more likely somewhere in her thirties. In other words, awfully old to still be casually using the word "retard" (Particularly in front of strangers in public, I imagine).

In her defense, she does tell the reader, just two pages prior that, this scene takes place "Back when all I cared about was how much I weighed and what my ratings were...I don't think I was a very nice person back in those days."

No, she doesn't seem like it, and I suppose ranting and raving about "a retard convention" is a decent shorthand to prove just how not a very nice person she was "back in those days" (a strange turn of phrase, since the point in time she's narrating from is just a few weeks later).

Here's another character in the book from a big "twist" scene a few issues later. He's Ormon, and he is a (spoiler, if you do wanna read this book and experience as its writer intended it to be read) demon from hell:

As a demon from hell, I suppose it's not surprising that an evil character would use any hurtful word, although as a 500-year-old demon from hell*, it's a strange example of word usage. "Simpleton" or "fool" sure sounds more like something a demon from the late 16th century might say. Then again, he's talking to a 12-year-old boy, so maybe he's using their language (Do 12-year-old boys still say "gay" and "retarded" to mean "anything negative in any general way," like I, to my shame and regret ,used to when I was in grade-school? Or have those words and their usage in that way been pretty much stamped out?)

Here's another character from the book, an actual 12-year-old boy, although through the infernal powers of Ormon he's been transformed into Superior's arch-villain Abraxas (While the word "Abraxas" has origins that pre-date comics by centuries, it's worth noting that both Marvel and DC have villains named Abraxas; the DC version spelled his name "Abraxis" and appeared in 1992's Armageddon: Inferno, while the Marvel one appeared in a Fantastic Four annual from 2001):

So that's three characters in seven issues saying some derivation of a word I haven't heard spoken since...Tropic Thunder, maybe...? And that I don't think I've ever read in a superhero comic published by Marvel or starring Superman, but I could be wrong. (Actually, I'd bet some money it was used in Millar's Kick-Ass more than once, although I only made it about half-way through that miniseries).

Anyway, three seems a lot for a comic book published in 2011.

*Now that I think about it, maybe he's not 500-years-old, but merely hasn't been able to convince anyone to sell a soul to him in 500 years, and he's actually the same age as all demons; the comic doesn't get too deep into demonic biology or the cosmic origin of angels and demons or anything.

Review: Ultimate Comics Avengers: Next Generation

Anyone trying to read the comic books Marvel published in their Ultimate universe imprint, which has changed its name from simply "Ultimate" to "Ultimate Comics", featuring that imprint's version of the Avengers characters has my sympathy.

The first three stories were rather clearly labeled and self-contained, making them easy enough to find if, say, you were scrolling through a list of offerings from a public library. There was 2002-2004's 13-issue series The Ultimates. Then there was 2005-2007's 13-issue The Ultimates 2. Then there was 2008's five-issue The Ultimates 3. Easy-peasy.

And then? Well, there was 2009's five-issue Ultimatum, one of at least a half-dozen miniseries featuring the word "Ultimate" or a derivation of it in the title and starring at least a sizable swathe of the characters from The Ultimates cast (You know, Ultimate Enemy, Ultimate Fallout, Ultimate Nightmare, Ultimate Secret and so on). And then there were Ultimate Avengers, Ultimate New Ultimates, Ultimate Comics The Ultimates, Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates...all miniseries, most by writer Mark Millar, and few appearing in trade collections that have the exact same title as the comics had when published serially, and some not even having the same title on the cover of the actual book as the one that's on the title page of the very same book.

So I've given up, and am just ordering them at random. This particular book, for example, says "Ultimate Avengers" on the cover, "Ultimate Comics Avengers: Next Generation" on the spine and in the fine print on the title page, and the comics inside were originally serially published as Ultimate Comics Avengers.

Why doesn't the mass audience that loves superhero movies read superhero comic books featuring the same characters they love? Because the people who publish those comics are crazy people doing their damnedest to keep people from reading them.

Just a theory. Anyway, this is written by Mark Millar, the guy who re-created Marvel's Avengers as "The Ultimates" along with artist Bryan Hitch, and I think it's his triumphant return to the characters, after Jeph Loeb had his way with the franchise in Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum (I say "think" because, like I said, I can't really make sense of the series now that it's a series of miniseries with ever changing titles; this was published in 2010, though, which would have been right after Ultimatum). It is penciled by Carlos Pacheco, and inked by five inkers.

What I found most notable about it was that it was not very good, nor was it very interesting, not even in the ways that Mark Millar-written comics can be good (or, sometimes, "so bad they're good" or, at other times, "so incredibly, insultingly terrible that they are fun to read" or, at still other times, "so aggressively juvenile and so desperate to be adapted into a movie that they are funny"). Compared to his first 26-issues featuring these characters, or a later story featuring some of them, it seems rather phoned-in and lifeless.

It opens with a full-page drawing of Samuel L. Jackson-playing-Nick Fury, who Pacheco and company have rendered to so closely resemble Samuel L. Jackson that he looks more like Samuel L. Jackson then he ever has before; amusingly, he looks even more like Samuel L. Jackson then the character in Boom Studio's Cold Space, a comic book co-created by the real Samuel L. Jackson to star a Samuel L. Jackson-like character that Samuel L. Jackson could play in a movie.

"What the %@#&?" he says.

Then we turn the page and we get a two page splash, in which we see The Ultimates' headquarters, looking like it always does, with Samuel L. Jackson and Ultimate Hawkeye (still in the unfortunate costume that Joe Madureira designed for him in Ultimates 3) in the foreground. The building looks clean and pristine, although there are a couple of cranes and a bit of scaffolding in the upper left-hand corner.

"I disappear for ten minutes and the whole place goes to hell," Jackson says, in direct contrast with the image. It looks like The Ultimates are maybe adding an addition to their base in a rather ambitious remodeling project, not like they have hired contractors to help them build their way out of hell.

Ultimate Hawkeye is recruiting Jackson to help him go after Ultimate Captain America, who has "gone rogue" because he "knows about The Red Skull."

Millar then flashes us back one day earlier, to when Cap learns about The Red Skull, the first issue/chapter ending with the surprising revelation of the connection between the two, which I will now reveal so "spoiler warning": Ultiamte The Red Skull is not a Nazi like Regular Red Skull, he's a neo-Nazi who is also Captain America's own son! Eh? How about that? Didn't see that coming, did you?

Apparently before going off to die in the war, Cap knocked up his girlfriend, the government took her baby away, made him into a super-soldier due to the fact that he inherited his dad's super-soldier serum through is dad's, um, super-soldier serum. But it turns out he was a bad seed, killed all his trainers, and then peeled off his own skin leaving only red, gory muscle tissue which somehow never healed up or scarred over, but remained red forever. And he got some tattoos on it. He went on to become a mercenary.

So now Captain America wants to beat him up or kill him or something, and the feeling's mutual.

It's a good thing they put some iron cross tattoos on Ultimate The Red Skull's head, and showed him throwing a baby out the window, because otherwise it's really, really hard to root for Millar's Captain America, upon whose head the "A" stands for France, but Asshole. As in, Captain America: Total Asshole.

I must admit, however, that Captain America being an unlikable bully and super-jock is at least occasionally amusing:

In order to bring in Cap, Jackson must assemble his Avengers, who are all new characters, or at least new versions of characters.

There's a new Black Widow, there's Ultimate War Machine (whose huge, Japanese-style mecha armor transforms into a car), there's a character named Red Wasp (Ultimates 2 villain Insect Queen wearing a rather inspired dominatrix version of The Wasp's original Silver Age costume, and replacing Utlimate Wasp, who died horribly and gorily in Ultimatum), and there's a new Hulk, who is green and smart (and whom the others derisively call "Nerd Hulk").

So Cap's trying to kill Red Skull, The "Ultimate Avengers" are trying to stop Captain America and also kill The Red Skull and things proceed as expected: Everyone fights a lot, and The Red Skull gets killed (Captain America impales him on a pointy bit of a jetplane, although the Skull manages to survive...only to be shot in the face by another of the Avengers).

Millar's political commentary is fairly muted and confused here, limited to Jackson dissing Obama by saying "our nice, new president" had "castrated" his military organization, which would only embolden supervillains (Obama never appears on panel, as Bush did in Millar's original Ultimates run) and a few terrorists talking about Secretary of Defense Hilary Clinton's cankles. The "heroes" remain ruthless, unlikable fuck-ups, with the worst offender being the guy with "America" in his name. Millar's Captain America kicks The Hulk in the nuts, calls all The Avengers grade school insult names and not only doesn't support the troops, he repeatedly sucker punches and beats them all up.

This hasn't changed since Millar's 2002 comics about the characters, of course, and so if Millar was saying something, he's not saying anything different. Was The Ultimates a commentary on Bush Era America? Then why is the commentary the same, as we enter the Obama Era?

Regardless of the relative weaknesses of the scripting, Pacheco and his quintet of inkers do a fine job, and this serves as a pretty good argument that while Hitch did a hell of a job on the first two volumes of The Ultiamtes, he was hardly the only human being capable of producing highly realistic (to the point of being photorealsitic), "widescreen" superhero action comics that nevertheless look more drawn than photoshopped.

I suspect this may read better as a whole, just as Millar's original Ultimates comics read better in their 13-issue blocks then they did as individual issues, but the comics aren't as easy to read like that anymore. For one, Millar's no longer in control of his own little universe, as here he's responding to events in comics written by Jeph Loeb and Brian Michael Bendis and, as would happen in a later story (which I actually read first) the sorts of crossover tie-in demands that the Ultimate Universe was conceived as being exempt from. For two, The Ultimates is no longer an identifiable brand or franchise, or easily follow-able series of comics. Rather, it's now a series of miniseries by different creators, and one need consult one's local comic shop for expert advice on what to read and in what order.

Review: Ultimate Comics Avengers Vs. New Ultimates: Death of Spider-Man

Yes, that is the actual title of this hardcover collection, although the six-issue miniseries it contains was originally published under the only slightly less onerous title of Ultimate Comics Avengers Vs. New Ultimates, with the "Death of Spider-Man" phrase running running as a banner a top each of the covers, where one might expect the title of the book to be, with the actual title running along the bottom.

Whether used as part of the title or merely as branding effort that looks like a title, the phrase "Death of Spider-Man" seems awfully out of place attached to this storyline, and I imagine it must have proven extremely irritating to anyone who encountered this story by paying actual money for it—$25 for the hardcover, or $24 in six monthly-ish payments for the serially-published chapters in comic book form—given how little the story actually has to do with the death of (Ultimate) Spider-Man.

Sure, the cover the publisher ran with was the one featuring a character that looks like a cross between The Punisher and Captain America (it's Ultimate Punisher, wearing something he doesn't actually wear inside the book) taking shots at Spider-Man with a sniper rifle, but you can count the number of pages on which Spider-Man appears in this book, and the number you come up with will be very low. Wait, I'll do it now: It's nine. Nine of the book's 144 pages have Spider-Man.

His role in the story is pretty incidental. SHIELD Director Carol Danvers' team of super-heroes, The Ultimates (Or "New Ultimates" of the title) are basically the old Ultimates Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and a new Black Widow and a new Giant Man, who replace the ones who died (The personnel changes, and the introductions of all of the other characters in this story, apparently happened somewhere between the end of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's second volume of The Ultimates and this series; Marvel quit numbering the volumes after a while, and re-branded the line as "Ultimate Comics ____" instead of just "Ultimate ____" somewhere during that time, so it's difficult to tell what happened when, where and in what order). Former SHIELD Director Nick Fury has his own team of super-heroes, who I suppose are called The Avengers. They are a black ops team consisting of The Punisher, Blade, War Machine and Hawkeye.

The two teams fight, with each believing the leader of the other team is corrupt and a traitor who needs to be destroyed. They are both being manipulated by a third party, who is so firmly ensconced in the cast that I suppose he was previously introduced as well. About two thirds of the way through the book, the two teams are fighting in New York City, and when hometown hero Spider-Man sees The Punisher training a sniper rifle on Captain America, who is busy beating the shit out of Nick Fury without letting his old friend and ally explain himself (because Ultimate Captain America is a psychopath), he decides to intervene. Not by webbing The Punisher's gun nozzle, or webbing Captain America to safety, or doing anything at all very Spider-y, but rather by jumping in front of jumping in front of Cap just in time to get shot in the side.

He's pretty badly hurt, but Captain America assures Spidey and the reader that it was "a clean shot," and that he was going to be fine. The Spider-Man disappears for 60 pages, with two panels of the epilogue devoted to letting the readers know that he is, in fact, dead; one of these shows his funeral in extreme long shot (That didn't stop it from being the cover of the sixth issue, though).

Did Spider-Man die as a result of the gunshot wound he suffered? I know from reading news sites devoted to comic books that he did not, but it is completely unclear from this book, which is, you'll recall, partially entitled "Death of Spider-Man."

The series was written by Mark Millar, and it was kind of a depressing read in that it seems to fit so seamlessly with what he was doing in his first two volumes of The Ultimates and his Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, back when Marvel's "Ultimate" brand and "Ultimate Universe" setting were so carefully constructed and curated by Millar, Brian Michael Bendis and a handful of artists. This suggests a comic book series or story that has been going on since the beginning of the Bush administration—the villain's plan, by the way, is to both covertly and overtly arm revolutionaries in axis of evil countries with super-powers to topple their regimes—and yet there isn't actually a straight line from what Millar was doing with Hitch way back when and what he is now doing here with artitsts Leinil Francis Yu and Stephen Segovia.

Rather, the "Ultimate" line ran into Jeph Loeb, his strange take on the concepts, the "Ultimatum" cross-over, his Ultimate X, re-titling, re-booting and a general 180-degree turn away from the premise of The Ultimates and the Ultimate line.

In other words, this sort of suggests what might have been, if Marvel and Millar just kept doing what they started out doing, instead of doing what they did.

The uncomfortable grafting-on of "Death of Spider-Man" aside, it's a fine comic, featuring all of the positive aspects one might expect from a Millar-written or Ultimamtes-starring comic—widescreen, action-movie inspired action scenes, self-consciously cool dialogue and lines—without any of the negative aspects one might dread from a Millar-written or Ultimates-starring comic.

Yu's art is particularly good, and I was a little surprised to see how well he could do Hitch-like versions of the characters and present a Hitch-like world. He's not imitating Hitch by any stretch of the imagination, but he can do realism quite well when he wants to, and the majority of this book has an extremely similar visual aesthetic to the original Ultimates comics.

I've always liked Yu's art, or at least what I've seen of it. I like the way he draws the tops of the bottoms of character's eye-lids, and all the times he draws characters with open-mouthed, teeth-baring faces. I'm not sure what this expression is mean to convey, exactly, but I like looking at it, and the fact that it's as distinct to Yu's comics work as a signature.

I like Millar's version of Ultimate Punisher, who differs from Regular Punisher in that he's slightly more insane, and Millar doesn't play as coy with that fact as writers-who-aren't-Garth Ennis usually play with the regular Punisher.

I also liked seeing vampire hunting vampire Blade in here, and seeing how well he fit into the Avengers-like milieu. Regular Blade could certainly be a regular Avenger in the regular Marvel Universe.

Despite being poorly labeled and poorly marketed, this ended up being a decent enough read, and was certainly far better than I expected (Even Millar's "African-American Hulk" didn't induce cringing!), and well above average in terms of a comic series starring the Ultimates (or New Ultimates or Ultimate Avengers or Whoever).

*******************

By the way. See this lady?

Did you know Natalie Portman played this lady in a movie? It's true!

Supergods: Not quite an industry tell-all, but closer than usual

One thing American politics has over American comics is that the former publishes many more and much more interesting books and memoirs. The political book market is a curious one, as it seems to exist primarily for participants to cash in on their experiences by telling their side of the story (which, in some cases, turns out to be a story of historical significance), revealing just enough new, gossipy, insider details to justify the political media paying attention for a week, which in turn justifies the book's existence, and then everyone forgets about the particular books forever, because they are all terrible and full of lies anyway.

Comics doesn't generate these sorts of books. Not simply because so many fewer people care about comics than they do about politics, not simply because there's so much less money involved, not simply because the comics media is a tiny fraction of the political media, and thus relatively few books about comics exist at all, but instead because no one ever really leaves comics, and it is thus, even if there was enough interest in comics memoirs from creators and industry leaders to regularly generate them, it would be all but impossible to get anyone to offer up any bridge-burning gossip or name-calling.
A prominent writer, artist or editor leaving one company (say, Marvel), would just end up across the street at the other (say, DC Comics) and probably, a few years later, they would end up back at the former company. If, hypothetically, former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter used to subsist on a diet of live puppies and kittens and bather every night in a tub filled with the tears of Marvel freelancers, most of the editorial staff whose job it was to procure live animals and gather those tears wouldn't share that information widely, for fear that they would have a reputation for talking out of turn and become unhireable.

When someone leaves a job in comics, they generally take another job in comics, unlike politics, where leaving, say, a presidential administration generally leads to sitting on a few boards somewhere and maybe lobbying. It's not like you're ever going to have to work with Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice again, so go ahead and write about what a bunch of babies they were.

I don't really read many of those sorts of political memoirs, but I always enjoyed the way they receive coverage, particularly from places like online magazine Slate, which would pore through them looking for the newsworthy/salacious bits to air in articles with headlines like "We Read Slimy John Edwards' Stupid, Self-Serving Book (So You Don't Have To)" (Note: I said with headlines like; that is not an actual headline).

As you may have heard, superstar comics writer Grant Morrison recently wrote a book, and I recently read it.

There are several strands to the book, and they sometimes intersect a bit awkwardly, but one of those strands is Morrison's career in comics, and thus many familiar names appear in the book, either as subjects or as characters, and Morrison reveals his thoughts and opinions on many of them. Mark Waid is nice...and smart! Glenn Fabry once drunkenly bit Karen Berger on the ass! Peter Milligan used to drink a whole lot with Morrison! Jill Thompson is striking looking! Warren Ellis was thin, eager and brainy as a teenager! Alan Moore is hairy!

Relatively little of it is along the lines of "Colin and Condi are sissies and I would have bombed Iraq two years earlier if it weren't for them," but it is rare, even refreshing to hear even this much talk of comics behind the scenes, and to hear even mildly unflattering opinions shared.

I thought I'd try to put together one of those Slate style "We Read Supergods (So You Don't Have To)" articles for fun, but you should read Supergods—it's much more engaging, educational and fun to read than, say, Donald Rumsfeld or Presidents Bush or Clinton's books.

I should note at the outset that the two creators who receive the most discussion in the book are Alan Moore and Mark Millar. Morrison rarely goes into any great detail, but he clearly has very complicated relationships with both men, and both are so important to comics today that Morrison couldn't have written this book without discussing them.

Morrison writes at considerable length about Marvelman/Miracleman and Watchmen, offering a fairly brilliant review of the latter before launching into its weaknesses. Both seemed to have dramatic impact on Morrison, as they showed the end of one particular road of superheroes, and necessitated him trying different directions for superheroes. Moore shows up as a writer glimpsed from afar though, not a character.

Millar's work is similarly dissected, particularly Wanted, The Ultimates and Civil War, with some discussion also given to The Authority and Kick-Ass. Millar appears as a character though, and is in many anecdotes, as Morrison and he were apparently besties and collaborators for years before...something happened, which isn't really explained at any length.

I whole book could probably be written about Morrison, Millar and Moore, and the way their work and relationships have effected mainstream comics and the mainstream's acceptance of comics in the last few decades (and influenced one another's work). Morrison talks about both men so often (Millar appears on 26 pages, Moore on 30, according to the index). I didn't really bother looking for good, juicy quotes to share; read Supergods to read his thoughts on them...and their impact on his work.

As for Morrison on some other topics of note to you, dear reader, please, read on...


On Bill Jemas:

—"By this time, I was coming into regular conflict with Marvel’s new fire-brand publisher Bill Jemas over the direction and execution of my stories. He’d been brought in to modernize along with Joe Quesada as EIC, and we’d all started out on the same page. But slowly I began to feel that misunderstood the fasion aspect of mainstream hero books and their need to constantly change with the times.

"The old war between groovy Marvel and stuffy Brand Echh intensified into playground name calling. Jemas expertly manipulated the Internet crowd, stirring up controversy to draw attention to his books. He referred publicly and disparagingly to “AOLComics” and called his DC rival Paul Levitz “Lol Pevitz” over and over in interviews and inflammatory press statements, as if repetition could eventually make it funny…Levitz, who had elected, in old-DC style, to play the role of gray-templed gentleman, resolutely ignored the ruffians hurling their excreta at his drawing room window, but quietly placed his tormenters on a DC blacklist. "


On Dan DiDio:

—"Dan was the same age as I, but bearlike and gregarious, with a Brooklyn tenor I loved to imitate when he wasn’t around. I liked Dan immediately and appreciated the respect he was showing my work, after Bill Jemas’ growing disinterest. "


On Joe Quesada:

—"I liked Joe a lot…"


On Brian Michael Bendis:

—“[Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin of Spider-Man] was perfectly composed in just eleven pages. (When writer Brian Michael Bendis was called on to update and retell the Spider-Man origin for a new generation of readers in 2000, it took six twenty-two-page issues to tell the same story in the “decompressed” screenplay style of twenty-first-century comics)”

—“A recent Marvel Comics event series entitled Secret Invasion was a direct sequel to The Kree-Skrull War but without any of the dazzling narrative tricks that made the original so remarkable.”

—“Bendis came from the independent comics scene and, influenced by playwright David Mamet rather than Stan Lee, he made alarmingly convincing dialogue the focus of his style and broke the rules of comic-book storytelling by having characters exchange multiple balloons in a single panel. His dialogue had a call-and-response rhythm that captured each voice perfectly, like the strains in a chorus, and soon he was Marvel Comics’s premier writer, dominating the sales charts for the next ten years with no sign yet of slowing down. When Bendis committed to a title, it was like swans mating, with ten-year-runs on his pet books”

—“Marvel parried with its own events. Civil War, as I’ve already discussed, was the best of them. But Brian Bendis also contributed the lukewarm House of M, and Secret Invasion—his sequel to the Kree-Skrull war in which the aliens won, Earth was conquered, and some slightly hamfisted attempt to compare Skrulls to radical Islamists were made, borrowed wholesale from TV’s Battlestar Galactica"


On Allen Heinberg:

—"Screenwriters, tried-and-tested storytellers from a more glamorous medium, were the only strangers admitted into the comics field during this time of withdrawal and consolidation…Unsurprisingly they didn’t write comics quite as well or with the same freewheeling abandon as the pople who did it for a living, and few lingered beyond their first unimpressive checks…Allan Heinberg’s short but effervescent burst on 2006’s nineteen-millionths Wonder Woman revamp was another rare exception, but the writer, who’d worked on the youth drama The O.C., couldn’t stand the poisonous atmosphere of comics fandom and made a swift, quite exit after a promising start, leaving the field once more to the diehards.”

[Ah, so it wasn’t Allen Heinberg that quit comics, it was us readers that drove him out of the field. What could have made comics fandom seem poisonous to a writer who was widely and greatly celebrated for his rather uninspired “I’ll take The Avengers, and make teenagers out of those IPs!” and supported to ludicrous, money-leaving-on-the-table-lengths by Marvel? Surely his inability to meet a deadline might have had something to do with it...?]


On Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s influence on the post-Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns supercomic:

—“Take out Moore’s passion, his excellece as a wordsmith, and his formal obsessions, and save only his cynicism, his gleeful cruelty, and his need to expose the potentially wounded sexuality of carton characters, and you had the germ of a strain of superhero-porn comics. Unlike Watchmen, which was written for a wide mainstream audience, the new superhero comics were pitched at fans in the direct market, who were tired of all the old tricks and craved shock-thereapy versions of their old favorites."

—“Elmintae Millers’ talent as a cartoonist and satirist, his skill as an action storyteller, and leave only his reactionary 'bastard' heroes—all those psychologically damaged sociopaths in trench coats, jackboots, and stubble—and you had the new model superhero in the late-eighties American style."


On his old enemy, the Internet:

—"Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses. They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly angry, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.

"…Too many businesspeople who should have known better began to take seriously the ravings of misinformed, often barely literate malcontents who took revenge on the curel world by dismissing everything that came their way with the same jaded, geriatric 'Meh.'"

—"It is, of course, telling that I’ve never met any reader at a comic convention who behaved the way many do online, suggesting that the Internet monster is a defensive configuration, like the fan of spikes a tiny fish erects when it feels threatened."


On Mark Millar’s radical, pioneering exploration of why nobody’s ever done a “real” superhero before his Kick-Ass:

—"Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to dpecit a 'real-life' superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aborginal memory of the early DC universe…

"...Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question 'WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?' Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type 'real world superheroes' into a search engine."


On The Red Bee:

—“The race to create superheroes with fresh gimmicks crashed headlong into one spectacular dead end with the Red Bee…[Richard] Raleigh was clever enough to have invented his own 'sting gun,' which shot effective knockout darts. He could have simply loaded up his sting gun, stopped right there, and still made a perfectly serviceable Golden Age mystery man called the Red Bee. But for Rick Raleigh, only one thing guaranteed his crucial edge over the violent underbelly of society: the hive of trained crime-fighting bees he kept confined in the buckle of his belt…until crime reared its snout. Ever eager to be set free in the cause of justice, the lead bee and chief offensive weapon in Raleigh’s apian arsenal was somewhat endearingly named Michael.”

—“If it seems ridiculous, it’s because it is. But there was something else goin on here: a radical eenchantment of the mundane. As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust. Bees could be special…Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal knon as Sportsmaster….In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil—remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael—after God’s own avenging angel—could pitch in to win the battle against wickeness.”

I think Mark Millar should have named his evil Batman character

"Badman" instead of "Nemesis." If you're going to do an evil Batman character and talk up how much you're pushing the envelope, why not push the envelope as far as you can, irritating DC and Warner Brothers lawyers and executives as much as possible? Badman will certainly be a better movie title than Nemesis anyway—IMDb.com has 19 exact matches for that title, and about 25 more for partial hits, video games and television shows—subversively bringing Batman to mind every time the title is spoken aloud.

Quick, Kick-Ass-related question

Forgive me if this is a ridiculous question, but I only made it about two issues into Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s gay-panicky, casually racist, delay-plagued eight-issue miniseries Kick-Ass, so I never made it to the part where pre-teen death-dealer Hit-Girl's secret origin is revealed.

I have read a lot of reviews of the new movie though, which sounds like it scrubbed the more questionable content of the comics while still managing to make the same existential error (premising a story on a realistic take on a popular fantasy genre, and then devolving into an extremely fantastic story with next to no grounding in anything approaching the real world).

Most of those are most focused on the character Hit-Girl, in particular her swearing and her ability to inflict Uma Thurman-in-Kill Bill casualties. Many of these reviews mention who she is and how she came to be, and, well, it sounds almost exactly like the origin of the 2000-2008, Cassandra Cain version of DC Comics' Batgirl.

According to the nation's film critics, Hit-Girl was trained in martial arts by her father since birth, subjected to crazy amounts of child abuse like being shot in order to learn to take a bullet, all for the purpose of turning her into a perfect killer.

Cassandra Cain was trained in the martial arts by her father since birth, subjected to crazy amounts of child abuse like having the shit beat out of her, getting stabbed and shot in order to learn how to take all sorts of damage, all for the purpose of turning her into a perfect killer.

The main difference between the two origins is that the one from the Batman comics seems a lot more realistic since a) Cassandra Cain paid a huge developmental price for all of that abuse, never learning to speak or understand English until long after she escaped from her father, and b) her father was one of the world's greatest professional assassins and spent years perfecting a training-kids-to-be-assassins program, where as Hit-Girl's father is apparently just an ex-cop.

Am I being unfair and oversimplifying their similarities, and they're actually much more dissimilar than they seem? I suppose I'll borrow a Kick-Ass trade from the library eventually, and then I'll see for myself...

Review: Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom

The second half of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run on Fantastic Four is collected in Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom, and it ends quite a bit more strongly than it began.

Ironically, the last few issues were ones in which the presence of Millar and Hitch were increasingly diluted, as Joe Ahearne scripted the last two issues from Millar’s plot and Hitch worked with additional pencilers Neil Edwards and Stuart Immonen on those issues (Throughout the eight issues collected in this volume, seven different artists assisted Hitch on inks, although the artwork remained surprisingly consistent looking until Hitch had to be helped with pencils too).

I think this fact is more of an interesting coincidence than any sort of indictment against the two guys with their names above the logo on the cover. While they may not have done as much during the finale as they did during the build-up, it’s very much still their story, and the fairly satisfying conclusion is clearly one that Millar had envisioned and been working toward, before either getting too busy or moving on to devote his full attention to more successful and lucrative endeavors.

The volume title takes its name from the climactic story arc, which is teased and foreshadowed throughout the entire volume, with little in the way of a meaningful break (The family’s trip to spend the holidays in Scotland and the children’s encounter with a Lovecraftian monster god—which Hitch does a great job of designing—being about it).

So who is this Master of Doom? Well it’s, um, Doctor Doom’s former master, the so-called original supervillain under which Marvel Comics’ greatest bad guy apparently apprenticed under for a while. He looks a bit like a naked Judge death in a veil, and he’s accompanied by a new apprentice, and the pair of them are traveling through alternate realities, killing Marvel Universes and Fantastic Fours on their way to check up on how Doom is doing in his dimension against his Fantastic Four.

I can imagine this development may have proved galling to long-time Marvel fans, as the idea that Doctor Doom—who is really pretty much a perfect supervillain—needs his origin retconned can’t have been a popular one, but in trade form one doesn’t have months between issues to think about whether or not that’s a dumb idea and, if so, how dumb an idea it actually is.

Millar does a fair job of presenting the Master as a terrible, apocalyptic threat, using many of the hyperbolic tricks Grant Morrison employed during his JLA run, and while Hitch’s designs for the new villains are pretty uninspired, he does occasionally land a great, menacing image, like the pair riding black vapor trails through a shining New York afternoon.

So the villains are built up as the ultimate of ultimate villains, they dispatch everyone, even Doctor Doom, and then it’s up to the FF to save the day against these impossible odds. They eventually see the way to do it, but to do so they’ll have to do something awfully unheroic—kill an innocent person—and, faced with two bad choices, Reed Richards must find the impossible third way (You know what else is ironic? That this story is plotted by Mark Millar, who wrote Civil War, in which Reed Richards constantly chose the lesser of two evils instead of either bothering to find the impossible third way).

It all comes down to our FF and a few allies trying to hold off armies of infinite, alternate universe versions of themselves while also dealing with a guy who seems like the biggest Big Bad they’ve ever battled.

It’s an exciting, imaginative story, and one that ends much more optimistically and, well, heroically than almost anything I’ve read from Millar since he was writing DC’s superheroes.

That’s followed by the resolution of the Ben Grimm/Some Random School Teacher Lady sub-plot, which is remarkably effective and even a little touching.

I’m still not convinced Hitch is the very best artist for The Fantastic Four (which, of course, does make him an interesting choice), but his art seems to flow better with Millar’s scripting through most of this volume (perhaps because he was slowing down, and didn’t have the time to over-reference and over-render everything to the extent he did earlier in the 16-issue run?).

He seems to have gotten a really good handle on The Thing by the time he leaves the book, giving the big brick gorilla expressive, soulful eyes, but for everything he does right, he does something as wrong as Doctor Doom’s nose—no longer the little bolted on triangle of Kirby’s design, but a big, honking metal bird-beak. I can’t look at Hitch’s Doom without giggling a little; it’s just too realistic, to the point of complete silliness.

It’s a little difficult for me to judge how clever the ending of the Master of Doom story arc was, given that the reveal of his identity seemingly invoked an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of (I assume; otherwise Millar just assigned him a back story that sounds like an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of and…well, that might be kind of cool, actually). At any rate, much of what seemed wrong about the presentation of the villains is made to feel right by the end (well, it felt right to me anyway).

I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that this volume was so good it redeemed the first volume (and, obviously, it didn’t suddenly turn the book into the sales juggernaut Marvel was probably expecting a Millar/Hitch book to be…and the major development regarding Doom seems to have so far been pretty much ignored in the Dark Reign business I’ve read, despite Doom playing a prominent role). But even still, it ended well, so that I left the Millar/Hitch FF run with much warmer feelings toward it then I had at the beginning, and that’s certainly something.


********************

OH, YEAH: I forgot to mention that there’s a point in the Master of Doom story where the big bad guy and a guy with similar powers think really hard at one another and bend reality and fill up a splash page with Marvel characters and alternate reality Marvel characters, which results in this:
Was there an issue of What If…? entitled What If Captain America was a Tyrannosaurus Rex for Some Reason…?

And, if not, why not?

Review: Fantastic Four: World's Greatest

It was a somewhat fortuitous coincidence that the same week I sat down to read some of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run on Fantastic Four was the one during which some clever soul decided to start the Twitter account Not_Mark_Millar so as to parody the way Millar talks about himself in public (“If Kick-Ass does not out-gross Avatar I will eat my shirt and you can punch me in the throat when you see me at conventions” for example, or “Had tea with the Queen today. Said she like my books and will knight me sometime this year,” and like that.)

Millar is a talented writer who has had some honest-to-God great ideas before, and there’s no denying he’s one of the more popular/successful writers of his generation, but his public persona can be a bit, well…insufferable, and his boasts not always grounded in reality.

His FF run was a particularly interesting entry on his bibliography, because it came after he had really made his name as a super-successful, blockbuster writer (as much as any superhero comic book writer can be considered a super-successful, blockbuster writer at this point in time), with The Ultimates and Civil War already under his belt, and yet it didn’t really sell any better than Fantastic Four under the previous creative team of Dwayne McDuffie and Paul Pelletier.

There are a couple of factors to consider before going with the most obvious reading of that fact—i.e. that the Millar/Hitch team lost most of the market heat they possessed during their delay-plagued Ultimates runs. First, McDuffie and Pelletier may have benefited from a post-Civil War bump, as their run was branded with an “Initiative” logo. Second, their run featured an all-new, all-different team roster, with Storm and the Black Panther filling-in for Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman, which perhaps gave it a bit of novelty that the Millar/Hitch run lacked. And, finally, Millar’s run was almost completely divorced from the day-to-day goings on of the Marvel Universe, with only the occasional mention of “registration” or superhero fighting acknowledging the events of the past few years. During Secret Invasion, for example, Millar and Hitch kept right on doing what they were doing, and a separate Fantastic Four miniseries was launched to detail what the team was doing during the big Skrull invasion.

Or maybe it really was as simple as fans not being all that excited about following another Millar/Hitch (supposedly) monthly comic. I know that’s the reason I didn’t even attempt to read this run as it was released in single issues, and am just not getting to it via a trade paperback collection of the first eight issues, one of the few books in the tiny graphic novel section of a new library I just visited.

I suppose there’s still one more possibility—readers and retailers tried out the first few issues of the run and decided they didn’t like it. After all, while it’s hardly incompetent comics-making or anything, this creative team makes for very poor heirs to the Kirby/Lee one, being particularly aesthetically ill-suited to the characters and concepts, and neither Millar nor Hitch do their best work here.

Millar does a good job of balancing the cast, assigning a plotline to each of the four: Reed Richards’ college friend/almost-but-never-quite lover comes back into his life, Sue is trying start up an all-female charity super-team, Ben has a new girlfriend, Johnny begins dating a super-villainess on the down low.

Each of these play through each of the issues, occasionally inter-tangling, but generally advancing bit-by-bit as perfectly adequate, soap opera-style plotting—it’s what you’d expect from FF or Spider-Man comics.

Millar also tries to play with big, crazy cosmic ideas, but cosmic has never been his strong suit. There’s a cabal of rich and powerful people building a new earth to escape when this one invariably collapses (And they actually all it “Nu-Earth,” completely unironically; the prefix “Nu- is one I recall being assigned to things that sucked as far back as 1996 or so, as in “Nu-metal” and so on), and an invasion of the present by the people of the future, pissed off about how we’re screwing them over all the time.

Those are some pretty neat ideas, although it’s unfortunate that Millar doesn’t do a whole lot with them.

The storyline which introduces the first concept quickly devolves into a pretty generic fight comic story, in which an unbeatable robot foe inspired by Robocop 2 is demonstrated as being unbeatable by beating up the whole Marvel Universe (Sentry/God included, although how the damn thing is so powerful is never explained, and the super-awesome robot versus the Marvel Universe combat all happens between panels), and it is then beat by Reed Richards, who then gets to wear the championship belt of the Marvel Universe, I guess.

The storyline dealing with the second sidesteps a lot of the ethical questions and, again, the science (or fake super-science; same thing, really) to deal instead with a team of Marvels from a possible future, so we get yet another alternate Hulk and Wolverine to spend time with.

Hitch is still Hitch, for better or worse. There’s no denying the man can draw, and his success and popularity are well earned, but that realistic style is less than ideal for a books whose cast includes a stretchy guy, a guy on fire and a guy who looks like a gorilla made out of bricks (in the same way that the FF looked pretty goofy in the live-action film—Jack Kirby characters shouldn’t look much more realistic than Kirby could draw ‘em, you know?).

Given how long Hitch and Millar have worked together now, it’s also surprising how often his images don’t quite work with Millar’s scripting of certain panels. The amount of detail Hitch puts in many of his facial expressions manages to freeze the characters during a particular reaction or a particular syllable of dialogue, but the panels will sometimes have several sentences or paragraphs of dialogue in them. In other words, the words are moving much faster than the pictures; it’s kind of like how Marvel comics used to have Captain America frozen in mid-leap, throwing his shield, while rattling off 150 words before falling back to the floor, only long after everyone knows better. (Hitch has a weird habit of drawing some of his female characters making weird faces with their tongues too, which makes these panels especially awkward; there are at least two occasions where characters speak a few sentences of dialogue with their tongues between their teeth).

It reminded me, rather unfortunately, of Millar’s Ultimate Fantastic Four run with Greg Land, who also freezes time awkwardly and with no regard for the scripting of the panel. Hitch’s art is, obviously, a lot less off-putting than Land’s, which often looks like air-brushed fumetti and features perhaps the worst character “acting” in modern comic books, but the pair share at least a few tendencies when it comes to synching up with Millars’ scripts.

And like Ultimate Fantastic Four, its greatest deficiency is it’s lack of fun and wonder. It’s fairly solidly plotted and drawn, it’s remarkably devoid of some of Millar’s more annoying writing tics, but I read the whole book cover to cover without chuckling once, feeling a tickle in my mind warning me that someone was at least attempting to blow my mind, “hearing” Ben Grimm’s voice or encountering the suggestion of a great idea left unexplored for now, something for other writers and artists to exploit and perhaps run into the ground later.

Those are the things that made Fantastic Four live up to the “World’s Greatest Comics Magazine!” tagline, and remain the criteria by which Fantastic Four reads like Fantastic Four to me. McDuffie and Pelletier didn’t quite get there either, of course, but they got a hell of a lot closer than Millar and Hitch did, and perhaps that’s the reason the all-superstar creative team didn’t move the sales needle much more than the talented-but-underappreciated one.

But that’s just my opinion. Let’s see what Not_Mark_Millar had to say about Mark Millar’s FF…

My Fantastic Four work with @THEHITCHFACTORY is the highest selling, and if you pardon a bit of self-promotion, the best since Lee and Kirby

Hmm. That’s actually more modest than I would have expected...

Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?

This summer Marvel Comics is in the process of ending their Ultimate line of comics, with the intention of relaunching the line as Ultimate Comics.

At the moment, the Ultimate Universe is being wound down. Of the three ongoing series, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men have already ended, and Ultimate Spider-Man’s last issue shipped last Wednesday. Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, the six-issue miniseries with a notorious three-year-long hiatus between two of its issues, just wrapped up, and the crossover event comic that’s supposed to serve as an official end of the line, Jeph Loeb and David Finch’s Ultimatum miniseries, is slowly but surely reaching it’s final issue (the fourth issue just shipped last week, and there’s one more left to go).

After that, there’s just a couple of special with the word “Requiem” in the title, and then in August Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man and Ultimate Comics: The Avengers will launch, although whether or not this will be a brand-new start to the Ultimate Universe or simply a re-branded continuation with a couple of new #1’s remains to be seen.

But either way, it will mark an end of sorts of Marvel’s Ultimate experiment.

When the line launched in 2000, the concept was simple enough: Start over for new readers, with modern comic book storytelling techniques, a fresh 21st century aesthetic, and 40-years worth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

While I don’t think anyone at Marvel was ever impolitic enough to say so, the Ultimate line was essentially the opportunity to do Marvel Comic right; excising that which dated the original stories in favor of something fresher, approaching the properties the way Hollywood was just then preparing to approach them (If I’m remembering correctly, the X-Men film had just come out, and Spider-Man was about to).

Without repeating myself too much, I think the Ultimate line worked extremely well at the beginning, with Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar each helming a pair of titles (Ultimate Spider-Man andUltimate Marvel Team-Up for Bendis, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates for Millar).

Unfortunately, the concept couldn’t quite last a decade, for a variety of reasons. Bendis as his collaborators, Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen, did incredibly admirable work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but Millar left both of his titles much more quickly.

Those who followed him on Ultimate X-Men seemed far too intent to introduce too much of the things that made the moribund Marvel X-Men franchise moribund, sucking the specialness out of it. Ultimate Fantastic Four was a mess from the start, with different creative teams every six-to-twelve issues. Too many artists of too many styles and levels of ability were drawing Ultimate books, diluting the brand’s association with quality.

And then Jeph Loeb came, and destroyed the Ultimate Universe.

Well, that was actually his stated goal with Ultimatum, but before Ultimatum #1 even shipped, it seemed Loeb was breaking the line, and probably not on purpose.

Loeb is, of course, a very popular writer whose written some pretty great comics and some pretty terrible ones; a writer who is either smart or lucky enough to have worked with some of the best super-comics artists in the business.

When he attacked the Marvel universe, he was coming off a particularly bad stretch of comics-writing for DC, a time in which he was one of the four writers for the Superman line, and then Superman/Batman and Supergirl. In fact, his last Superman/Batman story arc was about the two title characters fighting barely veiled analogues of Marvel’s Ultimates characters. In retrospect, it almost seems like his “Vengeance” story arc was simply a try-out for a gig writing for Marvel’s Ultimate Universe.

Once there, it was announced that Loeb would be writing the next two volumes of The Ultimates, volume three with the once super-popular deadline-challenged artist Joe Madureira, who had left comics for video games, and volume four with his Superman/Batman collaborator Ed McGunness.

At some point, plans changed, as Ultimates 3 became simply a five-part miniseries (the first two volumes were each 12 issues, with a 13the added to the second volume), and the fourth volume cancelled, as apparently the Ultimate Universe’s days were numbered.

Having just recently read a trade collection of Ultimates 3 that I borrowed from the library (which is really the only safe way to read it), I think it’s clear that, once Marvel published Ultimates 3 #1, they had no choice but to destroy the Ultimate Universe and either scrap the line and start over, or at least re-brand and re-number it in an effort to pretend the story never existed. It is that bad.

In fact, I think it may be the worst comic I have ever read.

I’ve been giving this some thought and, while I can think of some really, really bad comic books, all of them seem to fall short of the extent of Ultimates 3’s badness.

For example, 1993’s Darker Image #1 featured the most appalling, creatively bankrupt story I’ve ever encountered: Rob Liefeld’s “Bloodwulf” short story, which was nothing more than a blatant Lobo rip-off story, more poorly drawn and more poorly written than any Lobo story ever produced. But then, it was just a short story, only a few pages long. It was just a repulsive, soul-destroying black hole of a comics story, but, at the end of the day, it was just one-third of a comic book, and amounted to no more than one more embarrassment in Liefeld’s very embarrassing bibliography.

Or Death’s Head II, did any of you read that? Holy shit was that a terrible thing. But it was an early ‘90s comic book, and was terrible in many of the ways it was stylish to be terrible and, again, it was just a few issues, a blip of abysmal comics.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there’s no excuse to publish comics as terrible as Ultimates 3, certainly not comics that are part of the Ultimate line, which was premised on not being as shitty as the worst Marvel comics.

(Those are the only two comics I can think of that were perhaps worse than Ultimates 3; I’m sure there are many more, but I do try not to read godawful comics, so I don’t have any other candidates. If you have any suggestions for The Worst Comic Ever, please feel free to let me know in the comments).

The environment in which Ultimates 3 was released really accentuates it’s complete lack of quality. It was written by Jeph Loeb at the height of his popularity, wooed away from DC Comics. It was drawn by Joe Madureira who, okay, may not have actually ever been all that great an artist, but if this was enough to bring him back, it must have been pretty special right?

And, of course, it was the follow-up to Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s 25 issue of The Ultimates which, despite it’s sizable and numerous flaws, just may have been the most influential and oft-imitated comic of the decade. Following Millar and Hitch on their signature work was an unenviable task, and looked at from a certain angle, the fact that Loeb and Madureira were chosen to follow the pair makes a certain kind of sense.

If Marvel would have just found a writer capable of writing superheroes as if they were the stars of big, dumb Hollywood movies, and make them a little more edgy than their “616” counterparts (and maybe throw in some pop culture references), and an artist who could do hyper-detailed, photorealistic art, then the new team would likely have just seemed like a watered-down version of Millar and Hitch. Whether they were actually worse, or just as good or even better, the perception would have been that they were paler imitations, simply by virtue of coming second.

So Marvel chose a writer who writes nothing like Millar, and an artist whose style is diametrically opposite of Hitch’s. That I can understand.

Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out very well.

Loeb ditched the attempts at relevance. There were no politics, no pop culture, not even realism; in fact, Ultiamtes 3 is even less realistic than your average Marvel Universe story. He likewise abandoned Millar’s attempts to think of new conflicts, or at least new spins on age-old ones, retreating to old stand-by Marvel villains and plots (And like Ultimate X-Men’s Robert Kirkman, Loeb seemed to be trying to pack in elements from the Marvel Universe version, so in this series we get the same old Ultron and his same old relationship to the Pyms, we get the Yellowjacket costume, and the return of the superhero costumes over ribbed, leather work clothes, the Ultimates aren’t with the government but are back to being freelance superheroes living in a mansion, and so on).

The one aspect of Millar’s Ultimates run that Loeb did keep was the edginess, and he exploded it, trying to out-outrageous Millar, and while he does provide a lot of outrageous stuff (Incest on page 14!), it’s not grounded to anything serious, grown-up or real, and thus comes across as a juvenile attempt to be “mature.” Some aspects of the book read like a 14-year-old’s attempt to write a really cool comic book for the 1993 comics market.

As for Madureira, I haven’t followed his career as closely as I’ve followed Loeb’s, and I honestly don’t know if the work he does here is better or worse than the comics work he’s done before. It’s not very good though. In fact, it’s fairly awful, and there are some pages of this book that must be among the worst lay-outs in comics history.

But if you want the opposite of Hitch, you’ve got it with Madueira. I like his style and character design just fine as static images. He’s probably a pretty good cover or pin-up artist, and he’s certainly an artist I’d love to get sketches from. But he’s not much of a storyteller, and seems completely bewildered with what to do with a comics page, but we’ll get to that later.

See, I know I’m throwing around some pretty sweeping pronouncements here, which is why I want to devote a great deal more attention to Ultimates 3. It is a really, really, really rather bad comic book, but I think it’s a significant one, and so I want to try to back up those sweeping pronouncements.

But so as not to make this post ten million words long, or to bore you to tears (You’re not actually reading every word of this are you? You’re skimming my post right? I’d skim me if I were you; I talk waaaaayyyyyy too much for a blogger, if you ask me), I’m going to divide the series up.

So this week is Ultimates 3 week on Every Day Is Like Wednesday. We’ll be taking a look at one issue of the series each day, from Monday through Friday.

Two more things before we call it a night.

First, the trade collection, published as Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch? (Er, spoiler altert! Someone kills the Scarlet Witch!), opens with a rather curious two paragraph synopsis:

Iron Man.Thor. Captain America. The Wasp. Hawkeye. The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes assembled together to handle situations no other team could. Once kept under the thumb of the United States government, billionaire playboy Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) decided to take the team on t heir own, housing them in his private Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue.

That’s all stuff you’d probably know from reading the first two volumes of the series, and seems like legitimate catch-up, re-cap material. But then there’s this second paragraph:

Joined now by the Black Panther, Valkyrie, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, the team deals with conflicts that are both internal and external. Until six weeks ago, Valkyrie was an ordinary 19-year-old groupie, dreaming of being a super hero, yet she now possesses the powers of a goddess. The ever-silent Black Panther keeps to himself, with the exception of a yet unexplained bond with Captain America.

And that’s just the beginning.

None of that is anything you’d know from reading previous volumes of The Ultimates, and in fact deals with some storytelling issues. Valkyrie and Black Panther are new to the team, appearing as members in this issue with no explanation to their appearance there. Which is, of course, fine; stories often start out in the middle of the action or a new status quo, and then gradually explain things as they unfold. But Ultimates 3 never really gets to that, at least not in any satisfying way, and its inclusion in this prose introduction seems like an admission by the collection itself, a sort of “Oh yeah, you’ll need to know this stuff, because it’s not in any of the comics.”

And finally for tonight, I wanted to show a few examples of how Madureira’s style and design contrasts with Hitch’s. The latter is a far better draftsman, storyteller and “actor” than the former, but I like the former’s style better. At any rate, he’s clearly a very, very different artist, as his takes on the Hitch-designed characters clearly shows.



Here are the two Ultimates artist's versions of Thor. Hitch draws Thor as the biggest, broadest-shouldered, widest-chested of the characters (except for the Hulk), but he's still more or less just a big, strong, pretty cut human being.

Madureira's Thor, meanwhile, is built like a bodybuilder, or, more accurately, a post-1990's superhero or video game character. Are the muscles in his right arm real muscles that would appear on a real human being? I have no idea. Obviously, my arm doesn't look like that, and I don't read body builder magazines, so maybe they are, but if the arm looks familiar or "right" to me, it's because it resembles other superhero art, not something I've seen seen in real life.

Note also that the leg muscles, abs and neck muscles show through Thor's costume, so that whatever he's wearing, it's tight enough to wrap around individual muscles. That, or it's merely an artistic flourish on Maduriera's part, a way of showing how muscular the character is even if it's unrealistic to do so. Such exaggeration and artistic license is perfectly valid, of course, but, obviously, it's a very different tactic than Hitch employed during his run.

Madureira keeps the costume in tact, and his Thor is basically the same person, only drawn differently; perhaps Madureira's Thor has longer hair and a fuller beard. Also of note is the hammer; Madureira draws the standard Marvel Universe version, whereas Hitch's was some kinda of big battle axe/war hammer combo.




Here are the two Hawkeyes. The Ultiamtes 3 one looks dramatically different than the original, but then Hawkeye is a dramatically different person, having lost his family and apparently his will to livee between his first appearance and the beginning of the third volume. So he's grown his hair out and changed costumes.

The new costume is pretty stupid—the bullseye on the forehead, the weird, stylized H—but it's in fitting with the character, who is presented as pretty stupid in the story, and it's not as awful a costume as his Marvel Universe one, which would have looked crazy out of place in the Ultimate Marvel Universe.

I'm not sure why he has a mask now though. Is he protecting his secret identity? Or is it an intentional nod to the lead character in Millar and Jones' Wanted?



Here's Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. What I found most notable about their designs is that Madureira completely retreated from the Hitch designs, which barely even qualify as costumes (Witch's particularly; you could probably put that together visiting your average mall), and put them in variations of their Marvel Universe costumes.

I thought that kind of significant because neither of these characters actually have decent costumes in the Marvel Universe. Why doesn't Quicksilver have silver on? Why does he wear green? What's up with the Witch's little tiara/hood/hat/face frame thing? How does it attach to her head? Why does she wear it? These are the questions I wonder about the Marvel Universe versions, and now the Ultimate versions are dressing like them.

Witch's clothes are suppose to be inappropriately skimpy I guess, as a few panels after that Captain America's all like, "Er, why are you wearing lingerie outside like a whore yo?" This scene is kind of funny in that the siblings are about to go Christmas shopping in New York in December, so they decide to wear superhero costumes, and Scarlet Witch is more scantily clad then most people are when they go to the beach.


Finally, here's the Wasp. Um, to the upper right of Cap's face in the Hitch cover; that's the best cover image of her in her slightly more superhero looking costume from Ultimates 2. As you can see, Hitch obviously didn't have a lot of imagination when it came to the costume designs; there's very little difference between what Wasp wears and what Scarlet Witch wears.

Madureira gave Wasp a more colorful costume and added a mask, an odd choice since she has no secret identity.

It's also worth noting that Madureira's Wasp no longer looks Asian, and has longer, lighter hair to boot, but I don't think this was a conscious choice on Madureira's part to obscure her ethnicity. Because his character design is so influenced by anime and manga, if she were supposed to be Asian, she wouldn't necessarily look any more Asian than any of the other characters. And, as this is set sometime after Ultimates 2, there's no reason she couldn't have grown her hair out and dyed it. Hawkeye grew his out, after all.

Thus concludes are preliminaries. Tomorrow, Ultimates 3 #1!