| April 2008
|
Consider this review
a mea
culpa. For a while now I have
been vainly defending Marvel titles against charges that
they are increasingly aesthetically bankrupt, politically
two-faced, exploitative and just plain bad. I have sung
(occasionally in a somewhat strained falsetto) the praises
of Civil
War, of Runaways,
and even of Black
Panther. And for my pains, I have
earned the silent sniggering of friends and colleagues and
even an occasionally embarrassed wince from my kids. Well,
until further notice, I am turning my back on my corporate
paymaster (none of whom ever bother to pay me, only master
me through some sick kind of mindrays or somethin’). And
when they come to me blubbering, “Why? What have we done?”
I’ll be ready with my answer: The Ultimates
3.
Do we really need to talk
about this comic? Well, it wouldn’t be a
mea
culpa if it wasn’t painful. For
me, in addition to bringing shame to my lifelong Marvel
heart, the comic is also a walking advertisement against
ever subscribing to comics. In addition to not supporting
your local store, you end up stuck receiving a title that
has gone from great, to good, to unbearably bad so fast
that it makes your head spin (I tried to get the postman to
take it back, but he said it took him a week to deodorize
the truck after the last
issue).
Now lest you think I am a bigger fool than in fact I am, I
must say in my defense that Mark Millar’s
Ultimates
was an
exciting book: hardboiled, cruel, and blissfully
unromantic, it reimagined the superteam as we always
suspected they would truly be. And the trial of Bruce
Banner for genocide and the persecution of Thor as a madman
in Ultimates
2 was a fresh and effective
way to reask the age-old superhero question: what would
happen if super heroes did
exist in our
own hardboiled, cruel and tragically unromantic world?
What are
the real
consequences of a green monster detroying the downtown of a
major metropolis, in human lives? And who pays? And why
should we believe a long-haired freak who claims to be a
God, just because he can make lightning dance from his
hammer? After all, in this new century, who can’t?
I remind people of this only to point out that what Jeph
Loeb and Joe Madureira (both mostly Loeb) have done to this
interesting series, and in a twinkling of an eye. Three
issues in, in place of the kind of speculative science
fiction that made the Ultimates
fun to think
about, if not always to read, we have endless 90s-style
supervillain smashups and Xtreme cameos, a whirlwind of
cheesy plot devices that ultimately come down to a
dumbed-down “Who Killed JR?” mystery (only replace J.R.
With the Scarlet Witch), lots of Wolverine being
ultra-super-xtreme, and witty lines like (from Spider-man)
“You shot me, you screwball!” or (from Iron Man) “Didn’t
you see the sign on the way in, Blob? ‘The management
reserves the right to refuse service to anyone.’
That means you, you fat tub of goo” (to which, it pains me
to add, Wasp adds, “You go, Tony”).
Seriously, this is the biggest piece of garbage I have seen
under Marvel’s label for a long time, but it is not so
freakishly bad when compared to many of its recent siblings
that we can write it off as a mutant aberration. Part of
the problem is clearly Loeb, who has completely lost
whatever feel he might once have had for comics writing.
But the more systemic problem lies with Marvel, which has
suddenly lost faith in its readers after some fairly
interesting stories in the early years of the decade. I
blame it in part on a lack of editorial vision, turning too
much over to celebrity writers, many of whom have only
passing or nominal
We remained silent on the last Hulk
“event”
because we were inclined to want to shield our favorites
from shame. But we can remain silent no longer. Oh,
yeah—and we’re canceling our subscription before something
tragic happens in my house (like my kids get hold of it and
get turned off from comics forever).
