Tag Archives: superheroes

Ultimate Spider-Man: Superstars

Leave a reply

I have to admit this, right up front. Superstars tricked me. Despite the disclaimer around the initial two-issue arc that the writer knew full well it was over the top and not to be taken seriously, when I saw Peter Parker and Wolverine in the middle of a Freaky Friday knockoff, I rolled my eyes hard and internally kvetched about how this kind of thing is exactly why the Ultimate Marvel Team-Up series was mostly flawed, despite its quality moments.

But, okay, there were the disclaimers. But after that, the additional two arcs featuring first the Human Torch and then Doctor Strange meant more bad times, yeah? In fact, no! Instead, the first story introduces the canonical Ultimate Fantastic Four into crossover territory and gives Peter a chance to recover from the emotional wounds inflicted in Carnage. And the second story, well… I don’t like to say more because of spoilers, but it is a Spider-Man book, so you can probably guess.

The shorter version of all this is, you can still trust Brian Michael Bendis to write some of the best comic on the market. Even his fluff-piece breaks are still entertaining and verging on excellent in their own rights.

Ultimate X-Men: Hard Lessons

Leave a reply

The one thing that sticks out to me about my most recent X-Men book, Hard Lessons, is that there really weren’t any. There were several bridge stories placed to catch us up on characters that haven’t been around lately and to remind us about bad guys that will probably pop up again soon, but lessons? Nothing apparent to me! This doesn’t bother me all that much, but it is a little weird.

Instead of lessons, there are these stories. What’s up with Professor Charles Xavier? He’s maybe out of money courtesy of old enemies, and he’s also held hostage at a bank. And he’s a devious son of a bitch, which is one of those things I like about the Ultimate line. Yay, layers and shades of grey![1] What’s up with Storm and Wolverine? The one is looking for (and, okay, has just found) the other, and their pasts are about to team up to bite them both in the ass. What’s up with Rogue and Gambit? They’re about to face the return of Juggernaut, who, um, I kind of forgot had been in a previous book? Anyhow, all three stories produce incremental plot shifts that indicate to me big things are on the horizon, even if I can’t get the shape of anything but their inevitability. Which in some books might be an annoying delaying tactic; but in the hands of Brian K. Vaughan the stories are every bit as good as the future glimpses are.

[1] Well, deeper layers and more shades of grey than at least Marvel in the 1960s. I could be underselling later and modern Marvel due to ignorance, and I clearly was underselling the early Marvel catalog, which itself had a lot of depth. Especially for the time.

The Naked City

Leave a reply

What I find most interesting about the Tick, at least as an artistic endeavor, is that he has evolved in much the same way as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There are all these different version of the same basic story, told and retold while, one supposes, the creator keeps trying to perfect things. The very first version of the Tick was presented in comics, and in this case in the graphic novelization of those comics, The Naked City. (Although, since it’s colorized, I’m still not technically reading the very originalest version of the story.)

But who, you ask, is the Tick? He’s a superhero parody, is the short version. He’s a moderately insane, somewhat simple-minded, bumbling, incredibly strong and nigh invulnerable guy in a skin-tight blue outfit, with inexplicable antennae, who has appointed himself as guardian of The City. That “guardianship” basically means that he leaps around rooftops, causing an alarming amount of structural damage and looking for evil to fight. Despite himself, he usually finds it.

Populated with a boatload of ninjas and somewhat amateurishly literal parodies of Superman, Elektra and Kingpin, it’s pretty easy to tell this is the beginning of the story. The good news is that the absurdist humor is already reasonably solid, and by the last issue Edlund is starting to find his own more thematic-parody voice. I should find me the rest of the comic’s run. And the animated series. And probably the live action one? I wonder if there’s other stuff I’m not aware of. Perhaps a commemorative Tick silverware set?

Ultimate Nightmare

4 Replies

With my first foray into an Ultimate universe crossover series, I find myself wishing for the first time that I was reading these approximately as they come out instead of all jumbled together and out of order. One of the first thing I noticed about the Ultimate Galactus trilogy (or at least about its first volume) is that several of the characters have evolved well past who they were when these books were written. Specifically, both Wolverine and Nick Fury’s reactions to the X-Men seemed entirely uncharacteristic with my current expectations. But, on the bright side, I continue to make good progress and will eventually catch up.

The aptly named Ultimate Nightmare chronicles an unexpected worldwide multi-spectrum signal being broadcast from Tunguska, site of a century-old meteor strike that has been science fiction fodder ever since. Among the reactants to the images of an alien culture being destroyed while a mysterious voice repeats certain doom over and over are select members of the X-Men and of the Ultimates[1]. For the most part, the meat of the story purportedly being told lies in the future. This book was largely an excuse to visualize several bit character villains from Marvel’s past, in the guise of decades of Soviet experimentation. Luckily, as in the case of footnote 1, the book was more than entertaining enough to support being a mere prelude to the Galactus story I have been implicitly promised.

[1] Including a character named Sam Wilson with whom I am wholly unfamiliar; pleasingly, he was interesting to read about.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Salem’s Seven

Leave a reply

I’m not sure if it happens more often in some titles than others, nor whether I am noticing more often than I used to, but it’s definitely the case that some Ultimate storylines revolve around bringing back and/or reinventing heroes and villains from the original Marvel run. Sometimes this is fine, because it’s someone I want to see, and other times it’s iffy, because it’s someone I never have seen, but there’s an implication I should know all about them and resultingly a little bit too much character background is left out. Salem’s Seven was one of the best outcomes, however, wherein I’d never heard of them before, and yet the story they were brought into was entirely engrossing and entertaining.

There’s not much to tell plotwise that wouldn’t drift into spoiler territory, but this reminded me a lot of old school Fantastic Four, wherein all kinds of plot elements were thrown together just to see what would happen. You’ve got our heroes and their interpersonal issues, you’ve got a ridiculously sexy S.H.I.E.L.D. psychologist on a mission to determine the viability of the Baxter Building and its many projects, you’ve got a new batch of superheroes out of, implausibly, Salem, Oregon, you’ve got the return of Namor, and you’ve got yet another world-ending threat. This is what the Fantastic Four is (are?) all about, yo.

Utimate Spider-Man: Carnage

Leave a reply

Carnage is yet another book I am not sure how to adequately address. Not, this time, because I have mixed feelings about it. Rather, because there are huge turning point spoilers. I can’t say I know how long the consequences will ripple forward[1],but this felt like the single largest event since Peter first came to terms with his powers, or at the very least since the Ultimate Six storyline (but really that one was/will be more of a delayed reaction consequence thing, without the sense of immediacy shown here). Anyway, the story starts off with genetic engineering master-minded by Peter’s very first reformed enemy, Dr. Curt Connors aka Lizard Man[2], and ends up with the Spidey suit having been put away… for good?

Okay, probably not, but I think I like the idea of that part sticking around for a while. Brief spoiler discussion fodder below the footnotes.

[1] There’s an Amazon review (which you should avoid reading by all costs, as they are less good about spoilers than I) that implies the consequences are few if any. I’m not sure I can bring myself to believe it, though, since the series has stood out so high above the pack to date. I’ll let you know, though!
[2] Lizardman wins![3]
[3] I mean, spoiler alert, Lizard Man isn’t even in this book. I’m talking about something else. Continue reading →

Ultimate X-Men: The Most Dangerous Game

Leave a reply

I’m having a hard time quantifying my most recent Ultimate X-Men book. On the one hand, The Most Dangerous Game is every bit of retreaded ground that its title implies. What, you say? Mutants are being hunted for sport, and that’s all dangerous to the hunters? Inconceivable! But it has things going for it, too, including a nice murder mystery and a chance to get some face time with the many new mutants that have joined Xavier’s school lately. I pretty much feel like I have a handle on all of them again, and that’s pretty cool. On the whole, it was a perfectly serviceable middle-quality storyline that would seem terrible in some of the other Ultimate series and pretty much the best thing written in the rest.[1]

Things I look forward to in the next book: the fates of several X-Men missing from this story, and also maybe for Magneto or the Sentinels or some other cool ongoing enemy to come back. ‘Cause, those dudes are sweet.

[1] That most of the remaining “series” I have in mind tended to actually only be standalone books instead is perhaps beside the point?

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Ghosts

Leave a reply

It’s been almost a week and an unfortunately high number of other books since I read Ghosts, but I can certainly say that I liked it. The Cosmic Cube storyline that started all the way back in God War finally comes to a head, and in such a way as to make me like that book a little better than I did at the time[1]. Basically, big bad guy Thanatos shows up to swipe the Cosmic Cube he tricked Reed Richards into making for him, which has consumed Reed’s attention for so long that all of his relationships are falling by the wayside. And as if a godlike dude with complete control over death being given a device chock-full of cosmic powers[2] isn’t enough to worry about, two threats from the communist past are also hanging around to make life tricky for our overwhelmed heroes. So, if you’ve been missing the Crimson Dynamo from your admittedly non-existent Ultimate Iron Man series[4] or the Red Ghost (who you may recall controls hyper-intelligent animals and is also sort of a ghost) from this series, Carey has got you covered! Meanwhile, brief spoilers below the break. Continue reading →

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Leave a reply

Summer arrived at last. Technically, it arrived in the form of a horrendous downpour that was among the worst I’ve experienced from the driver’s seat. But the important thing is, I and my companions got to the theater in time, so none of that matters. What does matter is having seen the Wolverine movie, and having it work pretty well. Explosions: check. Pathos: check. A few new mutants, both familiar (to me, that is) and un-: check. Matches current movie series continuity: check. Matches current Marvel continuity: well, okay, that part not so much, although it could be that it matches some Ultimate continuity I have not yet exposed. However, I do not care that it didn’t, because all the other parts were done pretty well.

In the end, it was a nice little summer comic book movie, better than some that have been released over the past decade; and I have no driving need for more. Though if they want to give me a simultaneously hysterical and horrific riff on the Superman origin story while they’re at it, I am willing to laugh and cringe appropriately, and with a song in my heart. Well, y’know, sort of. Maybe less so during the cringe?

Ultimate Spider-Man: Hollywood

Leave a reply

I’m officially a broken record. All the same, the Ultimate Spider-Man series continues to impress. You really wouldn’t think that another fight with Doctor Octopus would be all that much of a much, but where Hollywood shines is in all the gaps and cracks getting filled in with juicy, delicious plot. And also, in this case, heaping doses of meta-humor. Because, you see, there’s a certain movie about a certain urban superhero, filmed by a certain Sam Raimi and starring a certain Tobey Maguire. And it’s being filmed in Manhattan without the permission of or payments to a certain Peter Parker.[1] As if that (and let us not forget Doc Ock) wasn’t enough, longtime Parker houseguest Gwen Stacy reaches a critical turning point!

[1] I think that said movie, in reality, was one of the inspiring forces behind the Ultimate universe reboot of Marveldom in the first place. Which takes the metaness to a whole new level.