A thing I have noticed about the Ultimate series in the wake of their big climax a couple of years ago is that most everyone has seemed adrift. Sure, Nick Fury put together a new black ops team, but that dude always lands on his feet. Everyone else, though… mutants are outlawed and being hunted to extinction, the Fantastic Four broke up, the Ultimates are in an unsatisfying holding pattern, and Peter Parker, well, he’s doing okay I guess, but his personal life has been teetering on the brink of shambles for a little while now, and since his stories have always been strongest on the personal side, I think he gets to be included in the general malaise of the series after all.

My prediction is that Thor Reborn, nominally about a new plot by trickster god Loki (and with a sideline into a truly horrible version of the Defenders that I really just wish had never been involved in the plot at all), is really positioned to be the start of returning the Ultimate universe to some kind of status quo, where things can seem appropriately light-hearted and/or epic[1]. I mean, without discussing anything that happens in the book at all, just look at the title! Once dead characters start coming back, there’s no surer sign in comic booklandia that things are getting back to normal.

[1] Those sound contradictory, I know, but for comic books, they just aren’t. And the whole run has felt, well, pretty heavy for a good long time.

I’m excited by the fact that the Ultimate Comics imprint is finally wrapping up enough storylines to have started publishing graphic novels again. After so many months of a limitless supply (that has finally dried up this year as I caught up with the line), I finally have an inkling of what people who insist on watching TV episode after episode all in a row must feel like waiting for the sixth (or whichever) season of House (or whatever) to finish up. While I will be saddened sometime in June by the speed with which I ran through my glut, for now, I can bask in the existence of two more books in my house after this one, both of which will tell me more about the future of that world.

Unlike Ultimate Thor, which is wholly comprised of backstory and origin on the Norse god turned Ultimate who we most recently saw… well, that would be a spoiler, I suppose, so I will say no more than that he hasn’t been in any of the books since Magneto’s ultimatum played itself out, culminating in the devastation of New York City and ensuring the destruction of all mutant rights for years to come. Though that is the subject of another book. Anyway, my point is that Thor’s story here tells only of the past, spanning the history of Asgard and his divine family, the unexpected enmity of Baron Zemo in World War II, and his re-emergence in the modern world some months ago, around the time that the Ultimate universe started reckoning time. On the one hand, it’s a good story (and perhaps a necessary one, after the way that reality was toyed with in The Ultimates 2). But on the other hand, of course I’m eager for more aftermath and new storytelling instead of retreading the past. Which is why it’s so lovely that the two more books on deck freed me to enjoy this one for what it was.

It is Really Hard to wait for new graphic novels to be released on their own schedule, you know? Or it could be that with the decades of digital Marvel comics I have access to and the decade (singular) of Ultimate Comics I’ve read over the last few years, I’m just extremely spoiled right now. All the same, it’s more exciting now when a good one arrives on my doorstep, and I guess that’s a fair trade-off, right? Case in point, the newest Ultimate Spider-Man.

Chameleons introduces another take on an old villain, of course, as you can imagine from the title. Well, really, it’s more like what I can imagine from the title, since you don’t read this many comics from the ’60s (and now I’m almost halfway through the ’70s, so, wow), but yes, there was a master of disguise called the Chameleon, back in the day. But next to such “sub”-plots as the government’s ongoing war against mutants, the Watcher’s choice for savior of mankind[1], and the return of J. Jonah Jameson, mere supervillainy doesn’t hardly rate. And since the Chameleon story was the only one that had me gasp in disbelief, it’s not like I’m saying it’s just because it wasn’t very good.

I guess my point is that next spring the Ultimate Comics line is set to explode, with maybe five different new titles, but for now Bendis still has the most control over the path of the overall story, and while that means Spider-Man is sometimes a bit player in his own title, it also means that the overall story is in the most capable hands, and I really like what’s being done with it.

[1] I can’t be shocked by the [re]appearance of Rick Jones, but I sure can be disappointed. This must be what it feels like to a be a Trek fan who hates Wesley Crusher.

I’m well over two-thirds of the way through the next book, mostly because I can’t be bothered to stop reading it long enough to actually review Crime and Punishment, the latest release in Marvel’s Ultimate Comics line. Although this certainly reflects far more on the book I have in front of me, I’m not able to claim, as I would like, that it has nothing to do with this one. Basically, it was not dissimilar to the previous Avengers book, but with fewer things I found awesome and more things I found subtly off. Which is to say, still more extraneous characters (apparently just for the sake of being new) and a focus that has shifted completely from the Ultimates in favor of recently-demoted Nick Fury’s blacker-than-black ops governmental hit squad. It’s not that I think a world full of genetically enhanced super-villains doesn’t need a secret government hit squad so much as that I think that’s a little more realism than I want from my superheroes comics. And then mix that in with the appearance of the Ultimate Ghost Rider, and I have a whole host of new complaints that are, admittedly, more fairly entrenched in my readthrough of the original Marvel line (where I have now gotten to October of 1973), and these complaints are purely personal taste, so take them as you will. But dammit, superheroes and the supernatural just don’t mix, five years of the CW’s Thursday (now Friday) night line-up notwithstanding.

Seriously, I just read a storyline where Spider-Man had to fight against a space werewolf. I like Spider-Man, you know, kind of a lot. And I like space werewolves! I just don’t really like them together. It’s like lemon pepper in spaghetti sauce: you’ll regret it. So now, when I’m watching these Avengers guys in combat against a skeletal biker sent by the devil to kill powerful people, it reminds me that it took about ten years for regular Marvel to start pulling this crap too, and I get a little bit despair-filled. Still, it is what it is, and it’s not like I intend to stop anytime soon. Oh, also, if you like the Punisher, he’s still kicking around and gets most of the best parts of this particular story. So that’s alright.

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!

The only particular problem with The World According to Peter Parker[1] is the name. I mean, it’s not a terrible name, and if it felt as much like the first entry in a series as the name implies, I might well have no complaints. But it’s obvious that there’s some amount of continuity that the reader is behind, regardless of the new imprint[2] the series is being published under. Maybe it’s not obvious that there are twenty-two volumes of continuity, but some amount is definitely detectable.

Everything not the title, though? Good stuff. Six months have passed since the Ultimatum event, which indicates some decent passage since Tony Stark’s one-man war against his stolen technology, and things are kind of getting back to normal. Well, unless you’re Peter Parker, whose life has changed in all manner of unpredictable ways. But that’s what I’m digging the most about this brave new world, is that with so few titles as yet launched in the Ultimate Comics line, Bendis is at least for the moment at the helm of the whole Ultimate universe. So we get to see the fates of some other familiar heroes[3], the violent rise of a new nemesis[4], and generally see the lay of the land, all while leaving room for a very gradual reveal of the changes (and underlying causes thereof) in Peter’s non-hero life. And, okay, I’m willing to admit that for the most part, this actually does work as Volume 1 after all, not just of the new series but of the whole new shebang, even if it was the second story to be told in this recovering universe. Which really is why I’m glad Bendis is the one mostly in charge right now, until more titles have launched.

All that said, the art is surprisingly manga-like. It’s not bad, other than in the case of one character that it might be spoilerish to even mention, but it’s a little jarring in this context. Still, yay for not being bad!

[1] And it may be a Garp [or some other] reference that I’m just not getting?
[2] Is that the right terminology?
[3] And, predictably, more of the awesomeness that is May Parker.
[4] True story: the end of the first issue? Total “Holy shit!” moment.