The only thing "Ultimate" around here is my sense of disappointment

"Ultimates Assemble! Ruby Tuesday closes in an hour and those coupons we got in the mail expire tomorrow!"

from issue 1, volume 2

Ultimates 3 #1

“Written” by: Jeph Loeb
Drawn by: Joe Madureira

I love my local comics store, Plan 9, okay? It’s a damn good comics store in its own right, and compared to the old Dragon’s Den it’s like… oh balls. My gift for metaphor has suddenly deserted me (that’s how bad the dialogue is in this comic. It makes you dumber.). It’s the difference between Original Trilogy and the Prequels. Between a Big Mac and a $50 Porterhouse steak. Between Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, Bumwine and a good Pinot Noir, Batman & Robin and Batman Begins, and… oh yeah! The difference between Dragon’s Den and Plan 9 is the difference between Jeph Loeb’s Ultimates and Mark Millar’s Ultimates. My point is, I want Plan 9 to make a lot of money and be successful. I really do. But DO NOT BUY THIS COMIC. Buy any other comic at all. Buy every other comic you can afford! Just not this one. Never this one. But Mr. Editor, shouldn’t you give the book more of a chance? Shouldn’t you reserve judgment until the story is more fleshed out?

No.

First of all, Ultimates 3 is apparently only going to be a five-issue series. I mean, now that I’ve read the first issue I consider this a mercy, but before then I thought, only five?

Millar and Hitch took forever to push out Ultimates 2, but it was by and large worth it for thirteen issues. How is five issues anything to make a big fuss about? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that Marvel was much affected by the WGA strike, so why did this book get cut short like Heroes? Did the temporary end of good stuff on TV make Jeph Loeb think he was granted an all-expenses-paid vacation? I am tempted to think that that is what happened.

Say what you will about the terribly lax shipping schedule of Ultimates 2—and no matter what you can think of, I’ve said it too—I can tell, from every page of every issue, that it was a labor of love, that Millar and Hitch were enjoying their work and that they believed in the story and they loved the characters. If Ultimates 3 is a labor of love, it’s the same kind of love that a member of NAMBLA feels while watching sitcoms on the Disney Channel.

I’m sitting here at the computer, Ultimates 3 #1 in front of me, and I don’t want to re-open it. I’m thinking, every comics writer has a peak and then a downslide, but Stan Lee, Frank Miller and even MOST HATED HACK CHRIS CLAREMONT had the decency to stretch their careers out for twenty or thirty years before sending crap like All-Star Batman & Robin and Sovereign Seven down the chute. Jeph Loeb wrote Superman for All Seasons and Batman: The Long Halloween, and come to think of it, since then it’s pretty much all been downhill. If you’re a hopeless DC dork like I am, look back at all the issues of Superman/Batman he wrote. Issues 1-26. They’re not that good! Taking down Lex Luthor, the reintroduction of Supergirl, and a lot of confusing time-travel/alternate-reality runarounds that don’t really mean anything. I think the man has begun to confuse a big story with a good story. Or at least, that’s what I’d been thinking for awhile until this came out. Now I realize, that’s just what happens when you have a crap writer and a team of really good editors and artists. You can make a lame story into a marketable one. Enter Joe “Throw it to the wall and see what sticks” Quesada and Joe “Who?” Madureira. Quesada these days seems to be in favor of anything that could successfully be turned into a movie, and this comic is certainly vulgar and mindless enough for that. As for Madureira… some of you may not recognize that name. But in 1996, he was one of the most popular artists in Marvel’s stable. He opened the door for other American comic artists whose styles were inspired by anime. By 1999 he’d left Marvel to do a creator-owned steampunk/fantasy book under Wildstorm’s label, called Battle Chasers. He put out seven or eight issues over the course of two years.

Since then, I literally have no idea where he’s been hiding himself. I think once or twice rival comics magazine Wizard mentioned him playing a lot of Final Fantasy X2, and I honestly don’t know whether or not they were joking.

His talents have not improved in the past six years. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say he got a very hung-over Pat Lee to draw the book for him. Which is not to say it’s bad, but it’s not the work that changed everything for me in the pages of Uncanny X-Men twelve years ago.

Anyway (there’s that word again). What’s the story itself? Venom attacks the team at Tony Stark’s mansion. Then the heroes all argue with each other. There’s your story. Now, someone else could make those basic facts into a good story. What route does Loeb take? Well, first of all, since it’s the Ultimate line he’s got to make it as dark and adult as possible, right? So, there’s a Tony Stark sex tape on the Internet that’s sent the team’s reputation down the toilet. And Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (still brother and sister in the Ulti-verse) are in love. Yes, Jeph, we really needed to make America’s burgeoning incest community feel welcome in the comics industry. Thanks for taking charge. What else is going on with the team? The Black Panther is a member now, not that you’d know except for the one page where he fights Venom for a second before being thrown off-panel. He doesn’t have a single letter of dialogue. Which, in some ways, makes him the best character in the issue. He’s better off than the Wasp, who apparently was made field leader of the team by way of affirmative action, since she’s the most ineffective team leader I’ve seen since Rudy Giuliani’s campaign manager (zing!). Yeah, by the way—Captain America, Black Panther and Thor are on the team, and WASP is the field leader? I know Tony Stark is an alcoholic with a brain tumor, but I still expect him to make better decisions than that. My biggest complaint, though, has to be about Hawkeye. Hawkeye was my favorite character out of all the old Avengers. He was a cocky loudmouth who questioned authority, but he proved his worth as a guy with a bow and some arrows amidst a team of superhumans.

Now he’s just an asshole.

He’s an asshole, and he stole his look from Grifter and Bullseye. And he doesn’t pull out a bow once. The closest he gets is a gun that looks kind of like a crossbow. A little bit. This is Loeb’s way of showing how much Hawkeye has changed since his family was killed in the last chapters of Ultimates 2: now he’s just an antisocial killing machine in a costume. Psst! Hey Jeph. Little insider information for you. We already have a character like that. He’s called the Punisher. Kinda underground. You may not have heard of him.

As final proof of the new rating (created for this issue) which I’m giving Ultimates 3, I leave you with the dialogue, verbatim, from the scene where Valkyrie and Thor take down Venom:

[Valkyrie slices into Venom with her sword.]

Valkyrie: Ugh. That’s like, totally gross. Eww.

Venom: You’re a very silly little girl—[Venom grabs the sword and swings it at her]—who’ll look much sillier without a head!

Valkyrie: Oh-my—[Lightning strikes Venom, reducing him to a puddle.]—God.

Thor: I did not care to be hit from behind, Venom—but I will be damned before I allow you to strike the woman I love.

Valkyrie: Awesome. You saved me.

Thor: You wouldst do the same for me.

Valkyrie: Yeah. I wouldst. [They kiss.] Yummmm.

Rating: One bottle of Bumwine.

Spoiler Warning! Ali Larter is Still Annoying

The inevitable fanfic pairing.

Editor's note: This issue was originally published in late January of 2008, thus the reviews of way-outdated stuff. My apologies for being so slack in getting these most recent three issues online.

Heroes Episodes 24-34

Written by Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb, and many other WGA members

Starring Masi Oka, Hayden Panetierre, Milo Ventimiglia, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Jack Coleman, Zachary Quinto and many more.

It’s rather amazing how closely Heroes mirrors its closest competitor (in terms of story, fandom, characterization and hype), Lost—even going so far as to have a muddled, half-decent/half-ugly “huh?” of a second season full of unwanted, less-than-likeable new characters and very right-field plot twists.

And thanks to the WGA strike, they didn’t even get to finish!

Guys—or girls, for that matter—imagine being at a party and finally sweet-talking that special person you’ve had a crush on for months, being lead into a dark and empty room, making out… and then they put their hand in your pants, and it’s like a Moray eel without teeth (or worse, with just one or two teeth. Some ladies need to learn to take off their rings before starting the no-pants dance). All fumbling and catching their fingernails on something that fingernails were never supposed to catch on, and yanking like it’s a microphone and they need to make an important speech or something, or just kind of feeling around randomly like they lost a contact down there… and you think, “Really? I wanted to do you?” And then because you’re drunk you say it out loud, and they hear you, and they walk away—so not only did you get a crappy handjob, you didn’t even finish.

To their credit, the writers did fairly well at wrapping up most of the annoying plot threads they’d come up with in the past season. The Shanti virus, Adam Monroe, Sylar and Maya, HRG and Claire, et cetera. But I'd hoped for a lot more, as the list below will make painfully clear:

-I hoped that Sylar would beguile Maya and, to use an old standby, “turn her evil.” Whenever the strike’s over, the third volume of the series is apparently titled “Villains,” and I was hoping that with her fucked-up power to cry black tears that spread a deadly airborne virus (seriously, if you could buy genetic superpowers at the mall, wouldn’t that one be the best-seller at Hot Topic? The answer to that question is yes. I can see at least one of my ex-girlfriends being first in line for the chance to be able to do that.), that Maya, who I didn’t want in the first place, would at least become a passable villain since she is a uniquely terrible Hero.

-Speaking of terrible Heroes, I hope to all the gods that are and ever were that Nikki is really, really dead in that stupid fucking explosion. Oh yeah. Spoiler warning. If you actually cared about that character, though—I don’t know. Just put this ‘zine down and walk out of the store and go open some veins in the tub. You are terrible. (I’m sorry, maybe I’m going a bit overboard because of the scotch, but I didn’t think she could be a more awfully contrived character without Jessica, but Ali Larter and the writers proved me wrong.) Really? DL died, and we had to put up with a whole second season of her whiny ass patronizing her super-intelligent son, and then she finally dies? Maybe? God hates me.

-I hoped that West, the slightly creepy flying boy, with his distaste for humans, would become a kind of young Magneto, a Heroes supremacist, and that Claire would still fall for him.

-I hoped that Noah Bennet would stay “dead” and work in the shadows for awhile.

-I hoped that DL would still be alive, and that Niki would eventually die.

-I hoped that the man Nathan saw in the mirror was an “evil” Nathan just like Jessica was an “evil” Niki; that there was a Hero with no body who just became the shadow of another person, like Malice from X-Men.

-I hoped that Hiro’s father was revealed as Kensei.

-After he wasn’t, I hoped that Kensei would marry the Princess and be revealed as the ancestor of Hiro, the Petrellis and Claire.

-I also hoped that Mohinder would make an honest man of Matt. They’re such a cute couple.

-I also hoped that Peter would either be dead or not in Ireland or the future.

-I also hoped that the older generation would tell us what their damn powers are! I mean, Matt’s dad was kind of an evil, chubby Xavier—the fight between the two of them was one of my favorite moments in the whole series, by the way—and Mr. Deveaux evidently had some sort of weird dream-walking powers, which was cool, but what about Angela Petrelli and Kaito Nakamura? They must have had awesome powers! But now we’ll probably never know.

Actually, there was Bob Bishop, who would look more at home among the supporting actors on The Office on Thursdays than three nights earlier with Hiro and Claire, but he’s got a badass ability—everyone on Wikipedia calls it chrysopoeia, the ability to turn anything to gold, but I’m positive he’s actually just an across-the-periodic-table molecule-transmuting guy. Then again, that could be another one of my expectations about the show that’s destined to be wrong. There were certainly a lot of those in the above list of hopes and dreams that just refused to happen because they would have been too fun.

If Daniel Knauf or even J.J. Abrams was producing or directing this series for cable instead of a network, they might have gone more in my direction—at least, I’d like to think. Instead, this season fell short of my own personal (re: completely irrational) hopes and expectations, as well as those of the critics and the viewing public. But, for once, I’m not angry. Not at Jeph Loeb or Tim Kring or any of the writers or creators, anyway. They crafted a great serial that beat the ass off of every other show except BSG (so I’m told) last year, in their first season to boot. I think it comes down to the strike. By the time they were midway through writing what became the entire second season, they figured out they probably only had five or six more episodes to wrap up what otherwise may have been a much longer, more thought-out story. I mean, I do some of my best writing in the throes of last-minute panic (or I did in school anyway), but that still had to be one bastard of a deadline they were up against.

With that in mind, I can’t be too down on Heroes, because I believe they really tried to continue making a show as good as they made in season one, and it wasn’t all bad. I grew to really like Claire. I actually rather liked the new character Adam “Kensei” Monroe, and I look forward to seeing him break out of his new prison somehow. I managed not to mind the miraculous recoveries of Peter and Nathan. And while most of the other new characters were pretty lame, Bob and his daughter Elle were okay, and Monica didn’t make me want the Earth to open up and swallow her, which was how I felt every second that Maya and her fugly twin brother were on.

Seriously, when I first saw them I had this terrible feeling that they were both going to have super-speed, leading to a slew of terrible “Speedy Gonzales” jokes and the like, but black tears and a deadly virus? How does a human being even generate a virus? I know this is a show where people fly and travel through time, but saying “virus” and leaving it at that just sounds lazy. Especially when there’s another virus, which is the crux of several major plot points, on the same show. Couldn’t she just emit some kind of poisonous gas? No, because anything biologically threatening has to be a virus or it doesn’t sound dangerous. People aren’t even afraid of E. coli anymore. I blame CNN.

All in all, as I said, I can’t be mad at the show’s creators for having to prematurely ground an ultimately promising endeavor. I’m glad we got at least some good episodes before the WGA strike started.

That said, all of you goddamned Commies in Hollywood better get your panties untwisted in time to finish writing season 4 of Lost, because if I don’t get my full 16-episode fix I might start stalking J.J. Abrams. I’ll leave little anonymous notes and drawings in his car and his mailbox, I’ll send naked pictures of myself from the neck down to his office, I’ll email coded messages to him and then part of the key to see if he can solve it… WHO’S MYSTERIOUS NOW, YOU COCKTEASE? WHO’S A GENIUS OF MISDIRECTION NOW, YOU FUCKING HIPSTER AMATEUR!

Sorry.

I’m just nervous about this strike continuing. TV was in the middle of a Renaissance. If that ends now… well, if any of you have seen The New American Gladiators… obviously the results will be troubling.

Rating: Three Tom Collins.