Tag Archives: graphic novel

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Volume 2

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After being underwhelmed by the first Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, I was looking forward to getting through the remaining volumes quickly so that I could move on to some of the side storylines I’ve been seeing in the future that look pretty awesome, and the moreso because apparently there’s some kind of big Ultimate Universe event coming up, and I can’t be more than halfway through the accumulated catalog yet. To my surprise, though, the second volume of the series’ rather short run was thoroughly enjoyable.

The stories are all short and fluffily irrelevant to solid continuity in a way that the other runs and one-shot storylines are not. But they are far more strongly written than last time, including another visit from the X-Men[1] to explain human-mutant relations that clearly predates the UXM series’ start, and a ridiculously non-canonical visit with the Fantastic Four that was over the top hilarious. It also included the origin of Dr. Strange via a direct rip-off of the first Spider-Man/Strange crossover story back in the ’60s. The best moment, Logan/Peter notwithstanding, was the Lizard-Man origin issue. Curt Connor’s tragic scientific success is one of the best “villain” arcs I’ve seen out of Marvel in either universe, even if there’s an underlying message about the consequences of meddling with nature that I’m not so happy about.

The art varied between perfect, wonkily appropriate, and just plain wonky. Really, the only thing I was unhappy with was that three issues were outright skipped between the first and second book, resulting in my need to either scour comic stores for the missing issues directly, or to rebuy the Ultimate Marvel Team-Up run in a single volume. Both ideas are pretty solidly meh, at the moment. But I’m sure I’ll do one of them, eventually.

[1] Plus, yay, more Logan/Peter interaction. Still easily the best Ultimate crossover relationship, though the Nick Fury/Peter and /Professor X interactions are quite interesting. It’s just, Fury is so damn unlikeable most of the time.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Silver Surfer

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Being behind makes for subpar reviews. So, y’know. But I liked Silver Surfer more than I’ve liked the last few Fantastic Fours, even despite the fact that it was a fair bit more divergent from regular Marvel continuity than I’m used to the Ultimate universe being. Basically, Reed Richards is continuing to research the cosmic cube he was tricked into taking home a couple of books ago, and this time he accidentally summons a familiar-looking silver being riding a familiar-looking silver surfboard. And then the world kind of gets kidnapped. As usual, the FF are the most sci-fi series in Marvel, even when it doesn’t seem to match the rest of the continuity. Sometimes, that bothers me. This time, at least, it was a pretty damn cool story, albeit one with no apparent continuity impact. But I could be wrong about that, easily enough. If I find out otherwise, I’ll let you know!

The Walking Dead: Here We Remain

So, you know how I said I like reading about aftermath? I had not been thinking about the horrifying and unrelenting series of tragedies that marked the previous Walking Dead volume, but it was certainly a well-timed claim. All safety is gone, an astonishing number of survivors have been slaughtered, and those left are scattered to the winds. Here We Remain documents the struggle to survive what will almost certainly be the series’ low point, survive not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well. There is unexpected hope on the wind, though, and a possible new purpose beyond simple survival.

The thing about the aftermath, though, is the psychology of it all. Most and possibly all of these people have endured enough to break anyone, and only the lizard brain’s drive to survive has kept them going. The cracks are obvious in everyone after these most recent setbacks, and it will be interesting to see whether the new sliver of hope is enough to start them recovering. In any event, if this is yet another Kirkman mislead with a dire outcome waiting two or three books down the road, I won’t really be able to believe any of them can cope with it. Related to all this, I’m also speculating that the torch of series hero has been handed off from cop-turned-leader Rick Grimes to his constantly underestimated son, Carl. And I’m looking forward to seeing what else the kid can manage; thankfully, the dead world has removed any trace of plucky kid syndrome that would make the whole thing annoying.

Ultimate X-Men: The Tempest

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I assume I liked the last Ultimate X-Men book, insofar as I’ve been liking them in general. Plus also, tragedy struck, and while I don’t automatically like that (depending on what happened), I definitely always like aftermath. And The Tempest is very much about aftermath, even though it’s in a quiet way, against the backdrop of a brand new villain and a mutant-assassin in his employ.

And, the book being short, that’s pretty much all that happened. I don’t want to elaborate on the aftermath, because, spoilers, and I can’t elaborate on the new villains, because I’m supposed to recognize them old school, and I did not get far enough to, I guess? But they made for a good story, and I can ask for little more than that! Except for being so deep into a series as to be pretty confusing, I could recommend the book unreservedly as an afternoon’s diversion.

So. That’s that, then!

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Volume 1

I may have mentioned at one point my sudden realization that a lot of things I have read during my what, year-long now Ultimate Marvel kick, had backward-looking references to some books that came out right at the beginning and I had initially failed to be aware of. But I’ve found these, and they are now in the rotation. Which brings us inexorably to Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, in which various characters from the Ultimate universe, you know, team up with each other.

Or, to be more accurate, Spider-Man meets other characters in an explicit crossover format that comes from the late ’60s or early ’70s or somewhen, because Brian Michael Bendis mostly likes Spider-Man and wanted to revive that format for the new generation. The only problem is, brief historical curiosity aside, the stories weren’t that interesting. The strength of Marvel, past as well as present, has always been its ongoing storylines with long-term consequences. Yes, there’s a lot of soap-operaish returns to life and failed relationships, but they are at least consequential from moment to moment, instead of seen once and irrelevant ever after. Necessarily, one-shot stories are going to come off pretty cold in a world where everything else matters, quite a bit.

All that said, the stories themselves were about a conflict between Peter and the first appearance of the Hulk in this timeline, during which stuff got trashed, Spider-Man proved his own relative strength and durability to the audience, and any kind of climax was left completely by the wayside; about a meeting between the also-inaugural appearance of Iron Man (complete with origin story) and our good Mr. Parker, who actually do team up to stop some… high-tech Communists, I guess? And, best of all, a meeting between Peter and Wolverine in which they try to fight off Sabretooth (he’s an evil mutant who is basically the same as Logan, only, y’know, eviller) before lots of civilians get hurt. Unsurprisingly to me, that last story was the most compelling. I assume it has something to do with what mutually-sympathetic, outsider characters Wolverine and Spider-Man are within their respective worlds. So, yay inevitable chemistry.

The art, which I only tend to notice when it is particularly egregious or unusual, or when the story is boring me, was in this instance equally boring. I wonder if I just think most of the art is fantastic and forget to say so, or if I’m really picky about handing out praise, or if I think most of the art is workmanlike and that only bothers me because I’ve focused on it in search of something to hold my attention when the story is so-so. Probably it’s the first one, but the correlation in my (possibly faulty?) memory between iffy art and iffy plot has been high over time.

Tales of the Vampires

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Back when Buffy and Angel were over and nobody had yet realized that they could continue the show via comics, Joss Whedon and some of his close writer friends got together to write up some ancillary material and dump it into a few graphic novels. One such outcome is Tales of the Vampires, in which an agreeable connective story (about a vampire who is, um, telling some tales about vampire-kind to some young Watchers-in-training) surrounds a reasonably high number of micro-stories that vary between so-so and surprisingly clever. As you’d expect, the Whedon-penned connective story is the best, with Jane Espenson’s entries an easy second choice. The art, as usual for old-style Buffy comics, isn’t really to my taste, but it’s never really that bad either. Mostly, though, it reminds me I should really ought to catch up on the monthly Buffy shipments I’ve been getting.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Devils

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In Devils, the Fantastic Four once again tangle with their first enemy, the Mole Man, an event which might turn out to have unintended and far-reaching consequences. I’m not really sure I trust the storyline to go anywhere, though, since it was part of an annual, which issues tend to be further than usual outside the main story arc of any Marvel comic I’ve read. (On the bright side, they are never completely separated from it, either, which still keeps them ahead of my expectations.)

But then they tangled with a Renaissance alchemist called Diablo. And a lot of other alchemists who were less evil but also had a lot of magical powers nevertheless. So, apparently, there’s magic in the Ultimate universe, not just lots of freaky science accidents. I guess I’m less okay with this than I expected, and probably because it’s taken so long to appear. Still, it’s a comic, and I’ll get over it here soon. More disconcerting was how containedly episodic the entire sequence felt. I won’t really know if I’m wrong about that for quite a while, but it might be worse if I am, since it really wouldn’t make any sense to dig the storyline up again, so solidly was it concluded.

Well, okay, there was one reasonably cool loose end. And time travel, which is always fun, even when there are no apparent consequences.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Cats and Kings

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The problem is, it feels like all of my Ultimate Spider-Man reviews are basically the same. That is the only problem, though. I’m pretty sure that if there were forty years’ worth of this series to read, I wouldn’t read anything else for a long, long time. As it is, I hold myself in check, so that I won’t run out for a while. (See also: the Dresden Files)

So, in Cats and Kings, Aunt May continues to be the best (rather than worst) supporting character in comics, J. Jonah Jameson[1] shows sudden depth of character, Mary Jane reveals new troubles that, in retrospect, have been there all along, and… oh, right! There’s also some crime-fighting! Including the return of Spidey’s first foe, the Kingpin, the reveal of a single-dimensional Elektra that has nothing much to do with the one I’ve reviewed lately[2], and new-to-me character Black Cat, who… okay, despite an apparent cribbing of a DC character you may or may not be familiar with, seems like she might be the best crossover between Peter’s life and Spider-Man’s since the Osborn family. It remains to be seen, though!

As usual, none of this comes close to capturing the essential funness of the series. Every volume is like reading the first day of sunlight in the spring in Seattle, or reading your kid’s first steps, or reading the first time you ever had sex with Scarlett Johansson.[3]

[1] He runs the newspaper, the Daily Bugle, where Peter Parker works. But you knew that?
[2] Which is pretty much a good thing. The Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra in their own books have no good way to cross-over with the rest of the Ultimate universe, unlike most of the rest of what I’ve read.
[3] Too much hype?

Lucifer: The Divine Comedy

While waiting for the third movie to start, ridiculously late last night, I made kind of a cardinal mistake. If I believed for an instant there would be a fourth Horrorfest, despite the missed timing, horrible scheduling of the movies over the course of this weekend and the next week, and the single digit attendance numbers yesterday, I would make a point of being at the beginning or in the middle of a long book during that weekend. Because now I have to take that much extra time to write a thoughtful book review, too? We’re taking eight movies in three days, you know! (Though it remains to be seen if that’s true, with special thanks due once again to the Fest’s carefully planned-for-maximal-uselessness screening schedule.)

But since the book in question is the fourth volume of the Lucifer series, I do have to be thoughtful after all. Dammit. The Divine Comedy takes a lot of elements of the story so far and resolves them. I mean, with a vengeance. There are maybe three things that are different from before the start of the story. They’re major things, but there are only three things! Given such an aggressive trimming schedule, I look forward to what will happen next. I am pretty sure that God still has a problem with Lucifer, and the archangel Michael is about to embark on a pretty impressive story arc. But beyond that, I have almost no guesses.

A thing that interests me about Gaiman’s Sandman world that this is drawn from: no Jesus. I mean, he is referenced in the vernacular on a regular basis, but, strangely for a series as steeped in religion as Sandman is, and much moreso for the Heaven-and-Hell-centric Lucifer series, Jesus does not show up as a character in any way. I have to imagine it’s really related to DC comics being worried about horrible press, but I’d like to catch wind of an in-story explanation. His absence is downright conspicuous.

Ultimate X-Men: New Mutants

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I’m not sure what, if indeed anything, it indicates, but I find that the Ultimate X-Men volumes are the ones that make me remember that I really need to find a way to continue my thoroughly stalled read of of the original Marvel runs. Are the Ultimate X-Men the least divergent from their 1960s counterparts? If so, I don’t consider that a bad thing; the X-Men are still what I want most to read, supplanted only by Spider-Man after something like thirty years’ of combined comics reading from that era.

And in relatedly good news, New Mutants continues the UXM trend of ever-increasing quality. Despite the addition of several familiar faces from the original X-Men, the story returns to basics: mutant-human relations, the people trying to improve them, and the people trying to destroy them, complete with politicking and knock-down, drag-out fights. It really is a great gimmick. Mutation contains themes of racism, teenaged outsider feelings, and the religion/science dichotomy in one neat package. Plus, one shocking event may change everything I take for granted in the Ultimate universe!

But the best part of the book was a short one-off issue between a newly discovered mutant and Wolverine, in which we discover the length, breadth, and depth of Professor Charles Xavier’s commitment to permanent peace between homo superior and homo sapiens. I am pretty pleased by this revelation and what it says about the series.