Comics: The Thunder Reigns!

The Thorapalooza Marvel Comics is unrolling in preparation for their $200 million dollar movie continues apace. Thor has no fewer than four series unfolding right now, and this week Marvel added a fifth with the first issue of the “Ultimate” version of the character.

We've seen this character before, of course; he appeared in the first story-arc of “The Ultimates,” Marvel's problematic attempt to modernize “The Avengers” ala Wildstorm's “The Authority. In that story, we're introduced to a big blond guy with a super-powered hammer and told he was a nurse in civilian life and only thinks he's the ancient Norse god of thunder. One of the pleasures of that original Mark Millar/Brian Hitch arc on “Ultimates” was following that thread, as this version of Thor fights the Hulk, bridles at government control of the team, is fought by and defeated by his erstwhile teammates, and gets imprisoned in a mental institution, apparently powerless. The final couple of issues, before Millar and Ellis decamped for other big, overstuffed bags of money, provided a vindication for the character that couldn't possibly have displeased any long-time Thor fan.

It's that “Ultimate” version of the character who gets his own series this time around, and the writer, Jonathan Hickman, has wisely decided to tell us a story that ranges in time, rather than one that simply jumps off the latest “Ultimates” continuity. This is especially good news because in the latest “Ultimates” continuity, Thor is dead, in Hell, negotiating to get back to Earth by sleeping with Hela, the goddess of death … and who wants to kick off a series on such a tacky note?

Instead, what Hickman gives us is a good old-fashioned cornball three-ring circus. We see Thor in the present day, incarcerated for insanity, forlornly tracing out the Poetic Edda on the floor of his cell. But we also see him “eons ago” fighting frost giants on the border of Asgard with his brothers, Balder and Loki. The characterization here is lightly but expertly done – seeing these three as brothers with radically different personalities, it's hard to imagine them as anything else (the whole scenario is a nod to Thor's non-”Ultimates” ongoing comic, in which a scheming Loki recently revealed to Balder that he is in fact a son of Odin). And balancing out these two story lines is one set in 1939 Nazi Germany, where Baron Zemo has discovered mystic Norse rune stones – and hatched a plan to use them in order to invade Asgard itself. Crackerjack stuff.

All of which is intensely enhanced by the artwork of Carlos Pacheco, here given a heft it's never had before by inker Dexter Vines. Vines takes Pacheco's standard somewhat sylphlike line and fleshes it out everywhere with dark spaces and hatchings that at times call to mind Walt Simonson's epic run on “Thor” from thirty years ago (rumor on the Internet has it that said run is being collected by Marvel into one oversized hardcover edition with remastered coloring ...if this rumor is true, I'm sincerely hoping the Silent Majority will take up a collection and send a copy winging its way to Stevereads the instant it appears).

When you bring the first-rate writing and artwork together, you get yet another Thor title to look forward to every month. It's an embarrassment of riches for us long-time Thor fans, who well remember the dark days not long gone when Thor had no title of his own at all – or the far more frequent days when whatever title he did have stunk up the comics store like goat cheese. It'll be ironic indeed if the movie that's presumably prompting all this good stuff turns out to be a disaster. When you've got Anthony Hopkins playing Odin, things could go either way.

Comics! Ultimatum!

I admit, I shared Elmo's skepticism when he handed me the hardcover graphic novel collection of the Marvel "Ultimatum" mini-series that was touted about fifteen minutes ago as being the biggest turning point ever in Marvel's 'Ultimate' line of comics.

Elmo made one of his typically withering comments about how idiotic "Ultimatum" is, how the graphic novel collection only serves to highlight that idiocy - basically, how the whole thing feels like the fevered half-assed 'wouldn't it be cool' musings of a high school comics nerd hopped up on Red Bull.

(Short bit of background for the rest of you: the 'Ultimate' line was Marvel Comics' attempt to simplify the long and convoluted backstory of their flagship characters and teams. Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four ... we got to see modernized, contemporized first issue origin stories for each of them, with no fifty years of cluttering-up. And some of those 'Ultimate' launches were quite good, in their way; I never cottoned to the X-Men or Spider-Man - even though they were, predictably, the move's big sellers - but I thought there were moments, sequences, issues of Fantastic Four and Ultimates that were very, very good ... often more vigorous than the 'normal' continuities unfolding right alongside them)

And Elmo was right, of course: one one level, "Ultimatum," written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by David Finch, is horrible. The writing is clogged with cliches (the Ultimate Hawkeye, as far as I can tell, speaks the whole time ONLY in cliches), the plot has holes you could drive a truck through, none of the roughly500 characters in the book actually behaves in character, and there's not a bit of narrative cohesion anywhere in the thing. Comparing "Ultimatum" to, say, the first story-arc of "Ultimates" is starkly, seriously depressing.

The story here centers on Magneto, the mutant master of magnetism. It turns out his daughter the Scarlet Witch was killed, and this drove him insane - or insane-er. So he does what any grieving father would do: he uses his powers to alter the Earth's magnetic polarity, causing massive geothermal and climate disruption, and slamming New York with a massive tidal wave (the glorious shot of that wave cresting and hitting Manhattan is some of Finch's best work ... except that he's an incompetent moron who opts not to draw it). This disaster catches everybody by surprise and kills scads and scads of people - ordinary people and super-heroes alike. The leader of the X-Men, Professor X, knows it was Magneto who did the deed, and he telepathically tells everybody else, including the scattered heroes who are fighting for their lives in a Manhattan that's suddenly become a deserted post-apocalyptic wasteland. Those heroes band together, fly to Magneto's lair, and attack him and his henchmen.

But I've read this thing a couple of times now, and I think it has one element that isn't horrible at all: it's freaking hilarious.

Not intentionally, of course - Loeb doesn't seem to have enough talent to be intentionally funny (the writing in these issues is noticeably awful, and this is some of the worst, sloppiest, laziest artwork Finch has ever turned in). But when you take a minute to remember the big-scale, fairly intelligent story-arcs that have happened in the 'Ultimate' continuity over the last few years, reading "Ultimatum" has the potential to make you laugh your head off. After only two or three pages, it becomes completely obvious that Loeb's pitch to the Marvel Powers That Be consisted of him leaning forward in his seat, blowing foam from his lips, and screaming "Kill! Kill! Kill!" It's a sad commentary on the current craven mindframe of Marvel Inc. that this approach (which very much is the kind of thing a Red Bulled adolescent would propose) got green-lighted.

But somehow Loeb did indeed get permission from his corporate masters to essentially wreck the 'Ultimate' universe, and boy, he goes at it with a vengeance. That's where the hilarious comes in.

I lost count of how many characters die in this graphic novel. The Blob EATS the Wasp. Giant-Man bites off the Blog's head and spits it out. Magneto snaps Professor X's neck. Dazzler drowns, as do boatloads of other characters. Giant-Man gets blown to giant-sized chunks by a swarm of suicide bombers. Sabretooth eats Angel's wings and crushes his head. Doctor Strange gets his head popped like a pimple. Magneto gets his arm chopped off. Then he gets gutted by Wolverine. Then he gets his head blasted off by Cyclops. Wolverine gets blasted to ribbons by Cyclops and Iron Man. Then he gets blasted to atoms by Magneto. Cyclops gets his head blown off. The Thing crushes Doctor Doom's head. It's like being inside the mind of a violent, dimwitted
teenager. It's impossible that even Loeb considers this any kind of storytelling - it isn't, it's just pornography. And after the third or fourth grotesque disembowelment, you can't help but laugh as the hits just keep on coming.

So this is the watershed of the Ultimate continuity. After all those big, daring stories, the whole experiment comes down to "Kill! Kill! Kill!" And if some future writer decides that there was potential left in any of the sixty or seventy characters Loeb kills in this one graphic novel, well, maybe they'll get permission to form some Ultimate Ultimate continuity. Why not? Sure as Hell doesn't look like anybody at Marvel cares one way or the other.

comics! Ultimates!

I've got a plea for all of you, involving Ultimates #12:

Please let this be the last Mark Millar comic you ever buy.

That's not just failed anticipation talking, although I WAS looking forward to this issue. No, it's a broader indictment: 'comics these days' only get that way if we LET them.

Some of you are familiar with the storyline so far: angered by the Bush administration's war-mongering and meddling in the Middle East, the 'axis of evil' (aided and abetted by Loki for reasons of his own) developes Middle Eastern equivalents of the Ultimates. These equivalents (wonder if that's their team name?) lead an army of huge machines and goons in power-suits on a full-out invasion of America. At the end of the last issue, the Ultimates' cause seemed hopeless, until the last-panel appearance of the Hulk.

OK, flash forward the year it took for this issue to come out, and here we are, Hulk smashing big machines like they were Dixie cups, while the rest of the team faces off with their foreign (= evil) counterparts.

The centerpiece duel is between Captain America and Abdul al-Rahman, but it doesn't amount to much because in the first second of the fight, Hawkeye, who has infallible aim and two sharp shards of glass, AND who's out of Abdul's line of sight, sends one shard into his left ear and one into his right Achilles tendon, crippling him and taking him out of the fight.

Oh wait ... that doesn't happen! Instead, Hawkeye tries to JUMP ON Abdul and gets picked off by the foreign (=evil) version of Quicksilver. So Captain America and Abdul fight.

Meanwhile, the foreign (=evil) version of the Hulk is kicking the crap out of the Ultimates version, crowing the whole time that the key to his ability to do so is that he retains his super-genius intellect, whereas the Hulk has the mind of a brutish thug.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye's bacon is saved by the real Quicksilver, who grabs onto his foreign (= evil) counterpart and runs so fast the poor SOB is torn apart by the speed. Right before he's torn apart, he pleads for his life. Right after he's torn apart, Quicksilver triumphantly says 'That's what happens when you threaten my friends' even though he and Hawkeye hate each other.

Meanwhile, in one of the worst-drawn fight-sequences since Herb Trimpe was still alive, Captain America and Abdul continue to duke it out. Abdul yells at Cap to 'Stop talking! Stop talking!' and then talks a bluestreak himself.

Cut to the real Hulk/foreign (= evil) Hulk fight, which is going poorly for the bad guy. We stay just long enough to see that he, too, is begging for his life.

We look away long enough to see Iron Man return to the fight, drunk, blasting away at the bad guys from the middle of his very own stash of WMDs. We know the tide has turned.

Then we return to the Hulk fight, just in time to see the foreign (= evil) Hulk get both his arms ripped off by our hero. The villain whines, "I ... I don't understand. How could you do it, Banner? How could you beat me? When I'm so much smarter? It doesn't make sense..."

To which our hero replies, "You know your problem, ugly scientist guy? YOU THINK TOO MUCH!' The last said while Hulk punches his fist clean through the head of his foe.

Meanwhile, Abdul is clearly losing his fight with Captain America, who urges him to give up. To which suggestion Abdul says "And why should I give up? So you can humiliate me and execute me before your fellow officers?" To which Cap replies, "Don't be ridiculous. That's not the way we do things in this country."

Just then a handy crowd of power-suited goons pile on top of Captain America, and Abdul, saying he takes no pleasure in it, prepares to cut his head off. At the last second, the Hulk grabs Captain America's shield, forgets that he hates the Ultimates, forgets also that Cap's shield has no sharp edges, and throws it at Abdul, severing both his hands (in a clever bit of scripting, Cap then throws off his goons by saying 'Hands off, creeps!')

When Abdul says 'My God, do you even appreciate why we did this thing?' Captain America impales him through the heart with his own weapon. You know, the guy who doesn't have any HANDS anymore? Yeah, that one - that's the guy Captain America IMPALES.

At one point in the issue, some of our heroes rescue President Bush from the wreckage of Air Force One. As they're bringing him to safety, he tells them he ain't gettin' outta Dodge until he knows the Vice President is safe. You get used to that sort of thing - the President is often portrayed in Ultimates as a dimwitted boob.

But don't be deceived. This comic comes to you straight from the middle of a GOP wetdream.

I'm not talking about the fact that our heroes not only kill their foes by the bushel when they could just as easily capture. I'm not even talking about the fact that lots of the foes killed are killed in the act of begging for mercy.

I'm talking about the culture of distrust the Bush administration has created in this country. The president is just an ordinary joe, and he actively distrusts 'eggheads' of any kind - a fact so beautifully brocheted by Steven Colbert to the President's face. He believes in simple, dead-or-alive frontier justice, without any nuance or ethic whatsoever.

And he's found his super-team at last.

Millar wants the dumb, bloodthirsty 13-year-old boys in his audience (regardless of their chronological age) to look at each successive panel in this issue and yell 'Hell yeah!' He doesn't care what he has to have these characters do, as long as he gets that reaction.

But you can't snort your coke and have it too. If this team is a bunch of fascist stooges who consider morality or thought to be excess baggage, that's Millar's choice as a writer. But readers have choices too.

Readers have choices too. When I saw that panel where the Hulk punches his enemy's head off yelling 'YOU THINK TOO MUCH!' (when what's clearly meant is just 'YOU THINK!'), I stopped reading Ultimates. Oh, I limped along to the end of the issue (yet another cliffhanger, and one I've longed to see). But at that point I was done with Mark Millar.

I urge you all to be so as well. The world doesn't need any more of this kind of thinking - it needs a whole lot less. You can't do anything about what's said at the U.N. ... but you can skip buying Ultimates #13.