Cannot wait.
Cannot wait.
Movie Theater DiaryQuoting Donald Glover
Yeah, what the fuck?
It began reading like Garth Ennis pastiche and just devolved from there.
Speaking of Alan Moore... Nemo Heart of Ice!
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Two minutes ago, shoved this book in wife's face and said "look!"
She doesn't care as much as I do.
I loved Century and its pop culture madness, but it's really nice going back to obscure Victorian references that I'm excited to google and read more about. I love finding the in-jokes that you only get after you know the context, like that crack about the Steam Men of the Prairies.
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For sure. As a reader most thrilled by Century: 1910, I can't wait to engage.
Box full of Delano comics was supposed to arrive. It didn't. I'm dying. I need.
This was amazing, by the way.
Yes.
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My Ultimate Universe readthrough continues...
Ultimate Avengers/New Ultimates (Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, & various artists) - Following Ultimatum, Millar returned to the franchise he'd started with Ultimate Avengers, a set of 3 miniseries about a black-ops version of the Ultimates. Meanwhile, Loeb picked up the thread of his story, such as it is, in New Ultimates. Millar tries desperately to ignore everything Loeb was doing - at no point does this ever feel like the world has been devastated by the events of Loeb's recent books - but the spark of Millar's initial Ultimates run just isn't there. His first miniseries is pretty good, with Cap squaring off against the Red Skull, with a nice twist that makes this version of the Skull an especially great nemesis. Unfortunately, the ending sabotages the story a bit by giving the Skull a poignant motivation for his actions that frankly makes no sense with anything else that happened. It's a sign of things to come, because the next 2 miniseries Millar wrote are shallow and hollow, simple exercises in superhero action with none of the deeper shadings that Millar, for all his bombast, brought to the earlier Ultimates books. The art throughout is great, especially Leinil Francis Yu's eye-popping work on the Ghost Rider-centric second miniseries, but Yu (and Carlos Pacheco and Steve Dillon) can't distract from the sense that this is Ultimates-by-numbers, a huge leap in quality from Loeb's lame stuff but still nothing special in its own right. Of course, Loeb still makes Millar look good by comparison since his New Ultimates is a continuation of the stupidity of his previous Ultimates work; it's a whole lot of effort expended to bring Thor back to life, and that's about the only thing that sticks here. Frank Cho's art is typically a pleasure to look at, with its particular cheesecakey charms, but it's not enough, especially since the coloring, which is nowhere near as bad as Ultimates 3 but still looks ugly, robs Cho of some of his charm. After all this stuff wrapped, Millar pitted the 2 teams against one another in a final miniseries, which is OK (and ties in to Bendis' "Death of Spider-Man") but nothing too special. Some nice twisty Fury stuff in there, though, and it's better than the vampires arc of Ultimate Avengers, and I like that Millar continues to utterly ignore Loeb's work even when drawing on a team assembled only in Loeb's previous series. Whatever, it's big dumb superhero action and it's fine if unexceptional at that.
Ultimate Spider-Man (Brian Michael Bendis & various artists) - So I returned to Bendis' USM after Ultimatum and it's still the most consistently entertaining Ultimate book. Especially in the all-too-brief period of ~20 issues in between Ultimatum and the "Death of Spider-Man" storyline. In those issues, Bendis crafts a dazzlingly fun new status quo in which Peter's supporting cast grows closer and denser, with Peter sharing his house with Gwen, Aunt May, Iceman and the Human Torch, with MJ and Kitty still revolving around them all. It's such a blast, really fresh and original and exciting. It's kind of a shame that this status quo had to be shaken up so quickly, because I for one could've kept reading this particular incarnation of this series for another 100+ issues, easily. Nevertheless, Bendis does a good job with the death arc, and it's exceedingly emotional to see Peter getting his life together only to have it cut short in a devastating fashion - there are quite a few moments in this arc that actually brought me to tears, something that happens all too seldom with any kind of art, but Bendis had done such a good job of getting me invested in this character, in this particular version of Spidey, that it hits really hard. He then introduces a new character as a new Spidey, and to his credit quickly makes Miles Morales nearly as interesting and fun to watch as Peter was, and so far I'm enjoying the new USM very much. Throughout all these later arcs, Bendis switches artists a lot in comparison to the stability of Bagley (who returns for the death arc, appropriately enough) earlier in the run, but for the most part the art is great, and arguably most of these artists are better than Bagley anyway. Certainly I love Sara Pichelli, who came on during some of Peter's last issues and draws a lot of Miles' adventures, and who has a great realistic style well-suited to this new Spidey's grounding in a somewhat realistic urban environment. Chris Samnee draws a few issues, always a treat, and David Lafuente, who has a manga-esque style, is probably the least of the bunch but still not bad. It seems like no matter what happens, USM is always a pleasure to read, and in around 200+ issues of Ultimate Spidey that Bendis has written so far, there are very few clunkers, very few moments or stretches where this book is anything other than compelling or packed with great characters and great stories.
I thought Millar's return was almost as bad as Loeb's, although not as haphazard. Instead of the broad political satire that was the germ of the series, he turned it into the standard "Villain will literally rape you for hours and then kill your baby" Mark Millar story. What was even the point of the Nick Fury backstory where he systematically sleeps with his wife's entire family and close friends?
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Nothing's anywhere near as bad as Loeb's Ultimates, but Millar's return is definitely a pale shadow of his original run on the title. Ultimate Avengers is very shallow, but at least provides some pleasurable and well-drawn action, even if one expects way more out of Millar's Ultimates. Anyway, here's a bit more Ultimate reading. Almost done now...
Ultimate Thor (Jonathan Hickman & Carlos Pacheco) - Hickman takes on an origin story for the Ultimate version of Thor, one that takes place before Millar's original Ultimates and fills in some gaps about the character and the nature of his ambiguous status as a god/human. The thematic throughline (and there's almost always one in Hickman's work) is faith - it's all about a god starting to believe in himself. It's pretty good, and as usual Hickman stirs up a lot of intrigue and layered mysteries, but it seems like a bit of a waste of his talents. It feels like to have much impact, it really needs to be the intro to something longer and more substantial about the character - and Hickman does pick up that thread a little in his Ultimates series with some echoes of the Balder/Thor relationship seen here - but on its own it's nice but not too meaty. Some cool stuff along the way though, like having Loki allied with the Nazis and storming Asgard with frost giants dressed in military uniforms, and Pacheco is a fine choice to illustrate Hickman's epic imagery.
Ultimate Captain America (Jason Aaron & Ron Garney) - Aaron is a perfect choice to tackle the hard-edged, meaner Ultimate version of Cap, and he clearly has a lot of fun with this gritty, punchy little miniseries. Cap is abducted by a Vietnam-era super-soldier, a Captain America who comes from a much more morally confused and ambiguous time in America's history, a man who cannot depend on Steve Rogers' moral certainty and faith, who is instead shaken to his core by the evils perpetuated in his country's name. It's an interesting set-up that pits different visions of America against one another. Probably the most interesting thing about it is the ending, in which Aaron confronts Cap's spirituality and religious convictions - it's rare for comics to treat religion so seriously and without a trace of mockery but at the same time to introduce substantial criticism, to deal with an earnestly religious character and wrestle with his faith without entirely dismissing it or endorsing it. It's good stuff, with a dark sense of humor and a strangely serious examination of patriotism and faith beneath its violence.
Ultimate Hawkeye (Hickman & Rafa Sandoval) - Hickman's usually dependable, but this series and this character are clearly not well-suited to his strengths. The first 3 issues are surprisingly generic, with lots of fighting and some perfunctory bits and pieces of Hawkeye's history as he leads a SHIELD team into a superhuman battle in Southeast Asia. There's just not much there, and Hickman seems to have nothing to say about Hawkeye himself, no real insight to provide about the character. He's just there, shooting things. The fourth and final issue abruptly becomes more of a typical Hickman comic, crammed with big ideas, remaking the Celestials, the Eternals, and Xorn in a grand way, but again, Hawkeye is just kind of there for no more compelling reason than that his name's on the cover. Like Hickman's Thor but to an even greater degree, all of this is basically prologue to a bigger story, which was in fact running concurrently in his Ultimates. This is basically an expanded backstory for some of the things that happen in the early issues of that book, where the resonances of the fourth issue's revelations have far greater reverberations. Here, it just ends, and despite the frenzied, weirdly compelling final issue, this is one of Hickman's weaker works.
Anybody read Delano/Pugh's two part story in Legends of the DC Universe? It's about a punkish young kid on Apokolips who tags Darkseid statues and it's like poetry.
And here's the last of my Ultimate updates. It was pretty fun catching up on all this stuff. A surprising amount of it was quite good. I know people are very down on the Ultimate Universe these days but I had a good time with it all, and I hope USM at least continues for a good long time with Bendis at the helm.
Ultimate Comics: Ultimates (Jonathan Hickman, Sam Humphries & various artists) - Hickman's brief run on this series (12 issues, the last few co-written with Humphries) is simply the best this book has been since Millar's first two series. It's the first time since then that The Ultimates has crackled with this much energy, that a writer has totally nailed the high-octane/high-concept thrill of this book when it's firing on all cylinders as it's meant to be. In this brief span, Hickman entirely shakes up the foundations of the Ultimate universe, and does so in a way that totally puts to shame Loeb's clumsy devastation; the scale of the destruction and chaos far exceeds anything that happened in Ultimatum, but here it's never cheap or unearned. Instead, there's a dazzling sense that anything can happen in these pages, that the world is being turned on its end and thrilling concepts are coming face to face with one another for the first time. It's vital, action-packed, and has just enough human-scale moments to ground the big science-fiction thrills. The characters and concepts set up in Hickman's otherwise lackluster Ultimate Hawkeye come together in a big way here, clashing with the equally audacious concept of Reed Richards' "City". And it's all drawn with massive drama and beauty by Esad Ribic. Just great stuff, and it's too bad that Hickman didn't stick around, though now he's applying some similar ideas over in his current Avengers run. Without Hickman and Ribic around, the book immediately loses that sense of vitality and propulsion; seriously, there are very few writers in comics today who can match Hickman's energy when he's fully engaged in something high-concept like this. Humphries tries his best, and introduces a bold new storytelling choice of his own, but the pacing, fast as it is, feels downright sluggish in comparison to Hickman's stuff, and the excitement seriously dies down. And while anyone would struggle to follow Ribic, for the most part the constantly changing art teams on Humphries' issues are a big disappointment.
Ultimate Human (Warren Ellis & Cary Nord) - A neat little miniseries that I procrastinated on because the premise, as I'd seen it described, seemed so unpromising, a mere confrontation between Iron Man and the Hulk. I should have known better with Ellis at the helm; this is no dumb action-fest, but a rather thoughtful and interesting examination of the drive to expand humanity beyond its natural limitations and capabilities. This idea is embodied in three men: Bruce Banner, whose drive to be better turned him into a monster, all brute force and no intelligence; Pete Wisdom, who makes himself into an opposite sort of monster, massively expanding his mind while crippling his body; and Tony Stark, who represents a sort of ideal form, his body and mind tweaked and expanded in subtle ways, his intelligence and strength married to technology, a real embodiment of the future, but still haunted and stifled by his very human weaknesses. Ellis plays off the echoes between these three very different men, all of them unified by the desire to be better, by their dissatisfaction with the vanilla human form and the lengths they've gone to transcend it. Genetic engineering and science-gone-mad are driving forces in the Ultimate Universe, even more than in mainstream Marvel books, and this is arguably the Ultimate U's most substantial and sustained consideration of science's desire to expand humanity. There's a surprising amount of poignancy in between the action, with Banner and Wisdom (AKA the Leader) set up as opposites joined by their self-destruction, their ambition warping and corrupting both their bodies and their minds.
Ah, I didn't know they introduced Ultimate Pete Wisdom and made him The Leader. That's a pretty interesting twist. I wonder why Ellis decided to do that. My guess is he wanted The Leader as a contrast to Hulk, but wanted to write his pet wiseass British guy instead of Sam Sterns, heh.
Pete Wisdom should really get more play in the Marvel U.
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Yeah, he's only in that series though. Ellis uses him not only to contrast/mirror the Hulk but also as a way into talking about US/British relations, the European union, and nationalism versus internationalism in general.
It's a good mini.
If I had $140 to spare...
http://www.goshlondon.com/heart-of-i...ve-gosh-print/
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really hoping cornell's return to marvel leads him back to working with captain britain, pete wisdom and the gang
I'm a bit baffled by the story and what the deal is after a few issues, but the art on Prophet is truly amazing. Spectacularly drawn, and definitely a book where the colorist earns his money. I'm enjoying.
Really an amazing book. Graham throws the reader into the deep end without regard for whether they can follow along, and he's always bringing up new concepts and characters as though we should be familiar with them already when in fact he's just mentioned them for the first time. It doesn't exactly get less dense or baffling, but gradually at least some of what he's up to here becomes clearer.
Anyone else think the Walking Dead is really dragging with this Negan guy and the Saviors?
I haven't read a monthly issue since #101. After going from volume to volume, I feel that's the much better option for Walking Dead. As mentioned in another thread, there's an entire volume that I'm sure would've been horrible to read month to month for the lack of action that happens, but as a volume, it reads very well as each character basically changes throughout, despite "feeling safe."
I wonder if they'll implement Negan into the show.
Well they gotta get to Alexandria first before they do a Negan /Savior saga.
Now that I'm done with the Ultimate Universe, my next big reading project is going to be a big DC read, covering all the Crisis books alongside some crucial 2000s DC runs. I've never read a ton of DC stuff, tending to focus on Marvel and indie books, but I want to explore the key DC material of the last decade or so. Any recommendations? Here's what I'm planning on tackling so far:
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Identity Crisis
Infinite Crisis
52
a re-read of Morrison's Batman and Final Crisis
lots of Geoff Johns (The Flash, JSA, Action Comics, Green Lantern)
Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman, Superman and Checkmate
Mark Waid's JLA
Jeph Loeb's Superman/Batman
Batman - Hush, Under the Hood, Death and the Maidens
Anybody have $1,000 to spare? Rafael Grampa is accepting commissions.
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