Good Guys Don’t Wear Capes
I used to read Marvel comics in the 80s. Every couple of weeks
I’d buy a stack of new ones from market stall that smelt of old books,
the only place I knew to buy American imports. In the nineties my
attention turned to computers, and those comic-runs became increasingly
rare.
I’d still sometimes browse the shelves of the specialist comic shops . And
usually come away with occasional “funny” book, a copy of The Invisibles, or something. It wasn’t until Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan
and The Authority that I actually went visiting with a purpose.
But I’d never go back to those Marvel books. Aside from not wanting to wallow in juvenilia, I’d missed out on years of interconnected backstory.
By 2000, Marvel had realised that having a continuity more convoluted
than Star Trek might be putting people off. The approach to their “Ultimate Universe” titles appears to be the same as the approach taken with comic-book movie adaptions of long running titles: take the body of work, strip it down to it’s iconic essentials and use that as the basis for something contemporary and accessible. And once you’ve done that, cherry-pick the archives for references to amuse the long-time fans.
And contemporary they certainly seem. The first issue of Ultimate X-Men
deals with the US government’s response to terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington: attempting to neutralise future threats by treating
brutally those who share a similar genetic profile.
But the terrorists in question were Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, and the publication predated by many months the events in 2001 that would give the stories an additional relevance. In a way The Ultimates represents the flip side of this story.
Following further attacks by Magneto, the (fictional) Bush administration
has approved $150 billion budget on the Superhuman Defence Initiative to
protect America from “post-human threats”. Regardless of the fact that
planning began on it long before, it’s difficult not to picture it as a post-September-11th update of The Avengers.
If you missed #1-6 already, I throughly recommend you pick up the collected paperback of book one.
Of course with the lack of any external threat in book one, by the beginning of the second arc the most effective member of the team has turned out to be their public relations consultant. The consequences of Dr Banner’s Hulk rampage is spelled out: 300 hundred dead, 15 million DVDs sold.
Issue #8 introduces the new (and yet familiar) members of the team, Hawkeye and Black Widow. Like many of the Ultimate updates, Hawkeye’s clownish old costume has been replaced with the more realistic SHIELD standard-issue fetish-club wear. (The pose on the cover of #10 appears to be a reference to certain movie poster.)
Of course, by realistic I mean the sort of things you’d expect to see in a Hollywood costume designer’s sketchbook. Both the script and artwork feels like a decent comic-book adaption of the big-budget movie. In a good way.
And, as if to beat you around the head with cinematics, #8 opens with a nod to the lobby shootout scene from The Matrix. Hawkeye, Black Widow, and a team of SHIELD soldiers set about slaughtering a couple of floors full of white-collar office workers in New York’s financial district while bantering over the radio (Although the Vin Diesel-esque Hawkeye, mid-battle, points out ”I can’t do this stuff and talk at the same time, honey!”).
Um. Ok. Unlike the Matrix, we’re not given any “it’s not real so killing is OK” explanation. We’re just treated to extreme violence without prior justification. Shocking for a title that’s characters have spent as much time chatting over meals as they have in the field. And it seems soldiers on SHIELD black-ops missions that apparently involve shooting unarmed civilians don’t even bother to remove the SHIELD insignia from their uniforms. Whuuh? Seems like an odd choice for “Danger Room”-style training program… Skrulls?
Ahh. Nick Fury reveals that SHIELD is involved in battling, not technically Skrulls, but the Chitauri – eight-foot tall shape-shifting alien reptiles who have been manipulating populations and events for the last 200 years. Hah! Mark Millar is using David Icke‘s space lizard conspiracy theories for the first level of the grand Ultimate conspiracy. Fantastic!
Ultimate War, while on sale now, is running ahead of the Ultimates continuity and bills itself as The Ultimates vs. The X-Men.
The destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge heralds the return of Magneto
and the Brotherhood of Mutants. Unable to have prevented the disaster, the Ultimates are concerned with using their abilities to recover the survivors. The comicbook superheroes of the 21st century have become fire-fighters with fancier tech, bigger budgets.
When Magneto attacks the Triskelion (the $50bn Norman Foster designed HQ of the SDI) the battle with the Ultimates consists of: Captain America throws his (metal) shield; Thor throws his (metal) hammer. D’oh. Given Magneto was the public threat that lead to the Ultimates being formed, you think they’d have been better briefed.
The flawed hero has been around for a while in comics. Ditto the dysfunctional super-group (although I don’t think the Pyms problems were quite as bad). But the idea of a Marvel Universe where the heroes have a realistic chance of fucking everything up, where every ill-advised gung-ho Captain America mission has the potential to become an Operation Eagle Claw, that’s the real change. That’s why I’m interested again. That’s why it feels like they’ve grown up.
