Ultimate Avengers: The Next Generation

With my completion of The Next Generation, there are no longer any Ultimate Comics for me to read, and I have to wait for new ones to be published. That’s just weird, is all I’m saying. As for the story itself, well, that was pretty good, albeit with a healthy dose of the darkness that the Ultimates have been known for in the past. That said, my ongoing read of old Marvel comics[1] has served me well in caring much about this story, because if I was not aware of the long-standing rivalry between Captain America and the Red Skull, it would have been a lot harder to swallow the idea of this giant terrorist threat that’s been around for decades, only we never mentioned him before now because of how he retired prior to the current wave of genetic superheroism.

Anyway, though that’s the main focus of the story, the stuff going on in the background as set-up for future stories is entirely intriguing, and that’s what I want out of another first volume of a re-reboot: lots of groundwork for awesome futureness. And I guess I’m done, because the plot part of the story is more than good enough for me to not want to carelessly reveal anything that actually happens, and yet the themes are not really all that deep the way they have been in previous Millar Ultimates stories. The weird (and sad) part is that there’s some pretty fertile thematic ground available, if they had chosen to exploit it.

Oh, and I will complain about one thing, which is the random insertion of a ton of new characters that seem unnecessary when there are old characters already sitting there, in some cases filling identical roles. I trust there will be some kind of payoff in future volumes, when these new folk become awesome? Except for the random new Stark brother, as that is just a downright stupid retcon that violates every other published story with Ultimate Tony Stark present, and as far as I know violates all the main continuity stories. (At least, the ones through the spring of ’72.)

[1] I am up to April of 1972!

3 thoughts on “Ultimate Avengers: The Next Generation

  1. Pingback: Shards of Delirium » Ultimate Avengers: Crime and Punishment

  2. Mike Kozlowski

    So I just read this, and MEH. It reads less like the Avengers, and more like the Thunderbolts (aka, a team of assholes/criminals who team up to do “good”, sort of, but secretly they are all assholes/criminals).

    I really dislike Millar’s Nick Fury in this. And his right-wing jingoism is more transparent here than in the Ultimates, or at least moreso to me.

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