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One of the worst comicbooks ever created. Ultimates is an insult to the very idea of the superhero let alone the Avengers.

Interesting take Daiyongo. I love the way you so comprehensively and thoroughly explain your position.

That The Utimates can be seen as an insult to the very idea of the superhero just makes me like a bit more. I mean, that's pretty great.

I like the analysis about "might makes right" and the weak genius becoming physically stronger. It's basically an homage to the original Avengers/Marvel approach that Stan used (hell, he has a blind guy become an ass-kicking acrobat in Daredevil), only amplifying it, and then Millar undermines his own position by showing all of the devastation that the Hulk causes, as well as the military's attitude towards Banner and the civilians in general, then undermines THAT by having the "all's well that ends well" at the end of this chapter, then continues to go forward and undermine that in Ultimates 2. Millar may not be adept at portraying politics in a subtle manner, but he at least doesn't provide any easy answers, and on the few occasions he does, he manages to undercut those points within the same story.

Not a lot of talk about Hitch's contribution here, though, which is a bit disappointing, as he really takes the "widescreen" comic approach to the next level here, providing some really cool, vibrant, detailed art that just vibrates with kinetic frenzy and would serve as almost perfect storyboarding for the kind of blockbuster movie you liken the series to. His facial expressions and body language work are underrated as well; some of it, at his best, is worthy of comparison with Frank Quitely, but it goes unnoticed for the most part, likely due to the flashier parts of the series and the focus on the storyline itself.

Yeah, I realised that I totally ignored Hitch about two minutes after the post went up. But, seeing as how I'm discussing The Ultimates 2 next week, I can make up for it then (and avoid repeating myself too much about his art). Though, I will say, I didn't enjoy his work here nearly as much as I enjoyed his work on The Authority, if only because he begins to rely too much on photoreferences and big pages -- since Millar is a much more accomodating writer in that regard than Ellis, who took advantage of big panels purposefully in a way that Millar doesn't quite understand, I don't think. I think he gives Hitch too much leeway (the bigger issues that just go on and on being a good example). But, I'll get into that in more detail next week.

Good point about the male heroes being inferiority-complex nerds trying to be big; one should also note that the only male character of the core cast who isn't a geek is Fury, who's treated as liquid cool without super-soldier enhancements ( looking like Samuel L. Jackson helps a LOT ). It's also why his pitch to make a superhero team is so convincing to these nerdy characters, and why they continue to run with it until well into the second volume ( when Fury's nation-building plans are so reprehensible that even jingoistic thugs like Cap can't support it ).

I'd say "The Ultimates" was pretty much the opposite of the Lee-Kirby "Fantastic Four". Deconstructed superheroes had been around for fifteen years. Widescreen superhero comics were at least ten years old. Combing the widescreen elements with deconstructed characters had been already been done by Millar and Hitch in "The Authority", just not as a team. The only new element was the use of Marvel characters.

So, Marvel reacted to industry trends in "The Ultimates", rather than starting them.

That said, it is a truly great story. Millar is smart enough to take one (and only one) theme and work it all the way around. Hitch made the thing look like a movie. It set-up a huge percentage of what Marvel was going to do going forward. I absolutely loved reading "The Ultimates".

it is ironic, because I did not like a single character in the entire series. The series of mini-series format gave Millar the freedom to create a cast repulsive enough to give voice to the themes that interested him. Not one of them is remotely admirable, nor do you grieve for their various tragedies. These are bad people who do bad things to worse people.

So is Millar's deconstruction of the Marvel-standard weakling-becomes-a-big-tough-guy trope intentional or not?

Bill, I'd say that it started off unintentional and then became fully realized as the series progressed. Regardless, it's pretty cool, even if Millar had no idea what he was doing with it, and it definitely seems to make this series far more memorable than, say, Ultimate X-Men, which reads like a low-end cartoon relaunch.

Authorial intent is interesting to know, but meaningless most of the time -- if you can find it in the work and justify it in the work then it's valid regardless of what the author meant.

I just really do not see what is such a great artistic victory about insulting it. Why am I supposed to be impressed when a creator takes these heroes be they Marvel, DC, Charlton or whatever and turn them into these totally unlikable assholes and crank the violence up to horror movie levels. Cannibal Hulk? Seriously? This is supposed to be how modern comics are so much more evolved from the Silver Age? Now that Tony Stark has a sextape scandal we can stick our pinky fingers out when we hold our wine-glasses satisfied in how the genre and medium is so intelligent and "adult".

Is there something really so awful about the fact superheroes are characters who think beyond themselves, use their powers to protect people and are colorful fantasy figures that we feel it is somehow more high-brow and sophisticated to portray them as totally unlikable assholes?

This is what I love about the current industry and fandom. Super soldier serums, lasers coming out of peoples eyes, no problem. A person who is good, far too much of a leap for the imagination.

Now I do realize that for the context of this thing is an alternate universe and all that. Fair enough but in modernizing the IP at what the hell point did the characters being likable come to be viewed as an actual problem?

I need to stop reading the comments on articles. I read a great review, remember what I love about the series in question.. And then there's people who decide to diss it. This upsets me.

Where is the man confident in his intellect? The man who doesn’t need to beat the crap out of others?

Nick Fury motherfucker.

Daiyongo -- It is a genre that needs insulting from time to time -- just as everything does. It needs to be looked at under a harsher light without the inane icon/legend bullshit that has become the dominant attitude over the past decade.

Beyond that, these characters DO look beyond themselves, which is made all the MORE heroic because of their flawed, unlikable personalities. Someone who is selfless and good when there isn't danger doesn't come off more heroic than someone who is selfish and egotistical, they come off less so, because the leap from who they are and what they do isn't as big. Note that most (I don't say all because of Banner and Pym) of these people, when they are needed, show up and save the world. That Tony Stark would rather be off getting drunk and having sex makes his choice to look beyond himself greater.

It's not just that someone who is good ALL of the time is unbelivable, it's that it's boring. A goody-goody boy scout Steve Rogers like we find in the regular MU is boring most of the time. A conflicted, somewhat unlikable bully-at-times Steve Rogers is more interesting, because that's how people are, particularly people with greater abilities or power.

That said, I do think Millar goes a bit far in making characters unlikable in spots. Thor, Fury, and Stark are all perfectly likable (Stark is more a goof than genuine dick), but the others do go too far in spots.

Everyone -- Also, I totally forgot to mention that Millar is oddly fond of the word 'witch' as an insult for women. I know it's supposed to be a stand-in for 'bitch,' but come on...

I've always been hesitant to read The Ultimates as a critique of the superheroes themselves. I feel portraying Captain America as a might-makes-right bully isn't really a valid critique of Captain America, because he's never even remotely been shown to be anything of the sort. Likewise, the Bruce Banner who enjoys becoming the Hulk instead of rues it; Millar has to change the paradigm too much to be a proper critique.

Everyone says The Ultimates are how superheroes would be in the real world. You can draw two conclusions from this.

1.) The Marvel Universe is lucky to have a Captain America who *is* an upstanding guy, a Bruce Banner who fights his destructive impulses, and so on. The mainstream versions of the Marvel heroes are shown as heroic because they transcend the foibles pettier men and women would "really" have. Result: The Ultimates is a celebration of the classic Marvel superheroes.
2.) The real world is lucky not to have the Avengers because of all the pettiness and destruction real people with superpowers would cause. Result: The Ultimates is a refutation of the wish-fulfillment "Wouldn't it be cool if superheroes were real?" notion.

The first is a bit much of a stretch, I think, but I can live with number two.

Is there something really so awful about the fact superheroes are characters who think beyond themselves, use their powers to protect people and are colorful fantasy figures that we feel it is somehow more high-brow and sophisticated to portray them as totally unlikable assholes?

No. There is nothing awful about a well-told story with likable superheroes. I loved "All-Star Superman", too. I judge stuff on whether it brings the goods, not what the goods are for the most part. Millar had interesting thoughts about the Marvel-type of superhero. He built an entertaining story around those thoughts. The fact that the characters were unlikable served the story that he was telling.

I generally like the Millar/Hitch Ultimates as an experiment, a "series of miniseries" featuring a take on what would happen if the sort of people prone to superhero power fantasies actually attained such power.

My only real beef with it is Millar's method of resolution in the thirteenth issue of both volumes, where we suddenly have some kind of standard superhero moralism smash its way in so the Ultimates have someone to beat up who deserves a beating. Both volumes use the same structure -- in the first six issues, the team's own lack of heroic or even sympathetic qualities causes it to cynically tear itself apart, and Fury to even more cynically cover for them to the public. In the second half, the cynicism is gradually washed away as utterly hateful bad guys turn up and, whattaya know, we not only need our bastards but our bastards stop acting like bastards in the first place.

The problem is that the rebirth of superhero-genre idealism and unipolar morality is invariably unearned. Volume 1 got around this by having a cynical epilogue, particularly as far as Betty Ross's predilections went. Volume 2, however...well...Volume 2 makes the mistake of settling what was previously a fairly intriguing mystery surrounding Thor, and doing so in a way I think was poorly-executed.

Beyond that, however, it doesn't work terribly well. Sanitized and silly as the Marvel version of Norse myth is, Millar and Hitch write a version that may as well have dispensed with the "reality of myth" idea entirely. And they often seem to miss the point of the iconography, with Millar -- typically -- favoring unsubtlety to the cleverer elements of myth and prior comics.

Consider Ultimate Thor's hammer, beloved of fanboys everywhere for "looking like a god's hammer should." Pity, then, that the short-handled Mjolnir of Kirby's designs is the mythologically accurate one, tyhat the weapon's supposed to look less imposing than it really is and its short handle is not only part of the myth but a way to ensure that the battle-lusty Thor of myth must wade into the thick of battle, the better to inspiring suicidal berserker rampaging from little Vikings everywhere.

Now, the U-Thor works visually and in terms of personality if we're meant to leave guessing if he's some far-out version of the mythic god or not, or if he simply isn't, or if "gods" are an entirely different matter in the Ultimate Universe. Millar never does any of that; instead, he makes his quite unmythlike Thor the mythic one, drags in all the other adapted elements from the Lee-Kirby shiny version of the myths, and then stands back while Hitch draws huge double-page spreads of rainbows and ogres and Vikingesque warriors. But neither an intelligible and purposively specific tonal deviation from myth nor the thoroughgoing design sense of Kirby's Asgard are in evidence. And the original myth isn't there at all, which is frankly small concern.

And Ultimate Loki is a painful failure as a character: giving a trickster god the power to reshuffle memories and reality is, in essence, removing any necessity for said trickster god to be...a talented trickster. U-Loki needn't cleverly deceive; he simply brainwashes by the very nature of his powers. (Indeed, much of the eventual resolution hinges on his deliberately making obvious, any-idiot-can-see errors precisely because his powers, not his innate or intellectual trickiness, mean everyone he affects has no choice but to overlook them.) Strip this bozo of his deus ex machina talents -- yes, that's a joke -- and he's no trickster at all. He's not a powerful god who's a capable and successful deceiver, he's a capable and successful deceiver only because he has the powers of a god. If Ultimate Thor is going to play against type, and do so in so overt a fashion that some sort of subtler answer is called for, Ultimate Loki is really an evacuated type with no new internality, just empty. He's a fiction suit without a wearer, little more than a pure plot device with dialogue. And in the bargain, Ultimate Thor's un-Vikinglike, un-Thorlike demeanor is never adequately accounted for; it's an arbitrary, shock-oriented departure with little narrative logic or thematic resonance.

So the decision to not only reveal that Thor is indeed a god, but to tack onto the already melodramatic Liberator battle a bizarrely-misplaced Jack Kirby spectacle of shiny heroes thrashing literally soulless literal monsters is...well, it's an utter misfire, a bizarre injection of undeconstructed and unreconstructed superherop comics after 25 straight issues of clever, satirical, sometimes moving pop deconstruction. And so, in a different sense, is the decision to make the Chitauri into soulless monsters who can only be killed, monsters against whom there is no weighty -- as opposed to superficial -- moral dilemma in unleashing the otherwise loathsome Ultimate Hulk or killing viciously and casually as in the first issue of the arc.

The ultraviolence is there for the reader to cheer at, where in the first arc it was there for the reader to rethink. Where the first trade of each volume asks some searching questions of the sort of entertainment we readers take from big super-fights, the second volumes elbow us in the ribs and happily collude with us, happily pretending the tough questions were never really asked at all.

Really, this is often Millar's failing as a writer -- he tends to lurch from unremitting cynicism and media-savvy to a thoroughly unreflective superhero-genre style without really earning the transition. You can't give the Liberators a half-credible grudge and an earned paranoia, then turn 'round and blame everything on the not-terribly-smart God of Evil as if the latter reveal makes any sort of narrative or thematic sense.

So is Millar’s deconstruction of the Marvel-standard weakling-becomes-a-big-tough-guy trope intentional or not?

I'd always read the book as more a political commentary rather than a superhero one... especially at the time it was coming out 'You're with us or against us', naming an 'axis of evil' and doing nothing about it, ignoring the UN, a President wearing a top gun jacket he didn't earn... I saw a lot of that reflected in The Ultimates.

I’d always read the book as more a political commentary rather than a superhero one… especially at the time it was coming out ‘You’re with us or against us’, naming an ‘axis of evil’ and doing nothing about it, ignoring the UN, a President wearing a top gun jacket he didn’t earn… I saw a lot of that reflected in The Ultimates.

Of course, in the end the tough-talkin' 'Murricans are proven right, and it takes their abilities to fight off those durn evil furriners (includin' a Frenchman powered by -- get this! -- harvested stem cells!). Oh, and all realityis saved by a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norse god, his munitions magnate friend, and their 1940s-era jingoistic soldier pal.

If it's satirizing the stuff you're describing, in the end all of that is not merely swept aside but actually valorized.

" I’d always read the book as more a political commentary rather than a superhero one… especially at the time it was coming out ‘You’re with us or against us’, naming an ‘axis of evil’ and doing nothing about it, ignoring the UN, a President wearing a top gun jacket he didn’t earn… I saw a lot of that reflected in The Ultimates. "

Superheroes are a uniquely American genre in their roots and methods, so while they aren't forced to comply with the worst of the country's most ardent patriots, they're a good satirical weapon against that excess. You could describe The Boys in the same light; it's not making fun of superheroes so much as it's making fun of military-industrial wankers.

I can't believe I ignored the politics... wow. Awful, really. Thankfully, I have you wonderful people to pick up the slack when I miss the completely obvious things. Now, to slink away...

Great insights Daiyango, never really thought of it that way but you make some great points. Suddenly I don't like Ultimates as much as I thought I did. You're absolutely right.

Really, this is often Millar’s failing as a writer — he tends to lurch from unremitting cynicism and media-savvy to a thoroughly unreflective superhero-genre style without really earning the transition.

This is a great point as well. Up until now Ultimates was the only Millar work I really liked, but after these comments I think I may actually dislike it almost as much as Ultimate X-Men, although it's still much better than Wanted.

I enjoyed reading it, I have the hardcover, but I wouldn't call it "great". It was a summer blockbuster. It was popcorn comics. That is all.

Sure, Millar tried to throw in some political analogy, but I didn't really find myself thinking too much during the Ultimates. It was action-packed and had pretty pictures, and I enjoyed it. But I didn't feel the need to buy the second volume, or much else from Millar for that matter. I gave FF a few issues, but it wasnt delivering. It seems Millar tends to think of things that will be really cool on the page without much thought to anything else. I guess Old Man Logan is a prime example, though I haven't read it.

So it was fun, but everything I enjoy about it (action-packed shit-yeah superhero stuff) can be found in Morrison's JLA, without the cynicism and asshole characters.

Omar Karindu reminded me of another reason I instantly disliked Ultimatum...

Magneto is pictured with Thor's Hammer from the 616 universe... NOT the Ultimate Universe...

And having just finished Ultimatum #5, (I've been reading the Ultimate Universe since it started and wanted to see it out)... I am actually almost, sorta, kinda, intrigued by Ultimate Avengers...

Despite being a 90s-style comics dressed up as a 2000s-style comic (i.e. very basic story-telling, lots of dense artwork, tonnes and tonnes of gore), Loeb has succeeded in removing a large number of Ultimate characters who were by and large almost exact duplicates of their 616 counterparts, rather than the "re-imaginings" that the Ultimate Universe started doing...

Millar now has a clean(er) slate to work with...

I just hope the issues come out quicker than Ultimates 1 & 2 did...

Honest question: Past Superman Adventures, what's the most likable character Millar's ever written?

The man just goes for sensationalist and wretched almost every time out. Even Spider-Man in 1985 came off as a complete jerk to the kid. Ultimate Ben Grimm had some great moments but they were more than counterbalanced by the notion of him wanting to cut himself or whatever. There isn't a likable person in Civil War. Not even close. Ultimate X-Men might be the worst of the lot. Everyone were young, edgy rebels.

How did he write Sue in his current FF run?

Does it really matter if a character is likeable?

Are they interesting is the most pertinent question.

Well said, Punchy.

Over one work, sure. Over two works, sure. Ove three works, probably? Over the entire broad range of a guy's work? I don't know. I think it's a worthwhile question, at least.

Yay! This thread gives me another excuse to tell everyone to read Millar's Swamp Thing. Seriously excellent. And even some likeable characters, including John Constantine!

Does it really matter if a character is likeable?

Over the long run, I would say "yes". In order to hang with a story through 100 issues (or TV episodes), the protagonist had better be both likable and relate-able.

In the short run, the protagonist(s) only need to be interesting. Consider "The Godfather" or "The Searchers". Those are truly great movies about interesting and unlikable people.

To me, that is why the first arc of "The Ultimates" is the high water mark of Millar's career. It is a story about people drawn together for professional reasons, so they don't have like each other for it to be plausible. The duration of the story is limited, so we don't have to believe they would hang out together for years. It gives him the freedom to do what he does best.

I like that assessment, Dean: "It is a story about people drawn together for professional reasons, so they don’t have like each other for it to be plausible." Dead on. I think what people always forget (and it's not exclusive to this book or superhero comics -- it extends to TV and film as well) is that this is a story about a job. We want a cast of characters that get along and are friends and that we can root for... except it's a job where the only qualification (particularly in this book) is that you can do the job. Everything else is a bonus or unnecessary.

" Consider Ultimate Thor’s hammer, beloved of fanboys everywhere for “looking like a god’s hammer should.” Pity, then, that the short-handled Mjolnir of Kirby’s designs is the mythologically accurate one, tyhat the weapon’s supposed to look less imposing than it really is and its short handle is not only part of the myth but a way to ensure that the battle-lusty Thor of myth must wade into the thick of battle, the better to inspiring suicidal berserker rampaging from little Vikings everywhere. "

Kirby's Thor was hardly mythologically accurate, since scholars agree that the Vikings didn't worship a Thunder God with a clean-shaven face, straight blonde hair, a metal cap with wings on the side, a red cape, and big blue discs attached to his tunic. And the Marvel Thor never really had to wade into the thick of battle anyway, since unless he was fighting a rare equal or better to himself, he could just throw the thing at whoever he was facing and it would always return.

For me Ultimate Mjolnir works because yes, it's massive and ornate, but it looks like something Thor and only Thor could use properly. It's like the really awesome monstrosities you get towards the end of a fantasy video game, as opposed to the vanilla starter weapons ( which is what the Classic Marvel Mjolnir looks like ).

Kirby was mythologically inaccurate, yes, but largely in the service of his own distinct and fleshed-out aesthetic. Honestly, I disliked Ultimate Thor's visuals primarily because of issue #13 of the second volume, where -- as I noted above -- it became clear that it was, as you seem to be saying, merely a borrowed contemporary aesthetic rather than a programmatically interesting deviation as was Kirby's.

The minute you ditch the notion that he's a sort of metafictional take on Thor, both his leftist idealism and his revamped look become less a considered artistic decision than a rather easy aping of a style in abundance in every other medium. It's a lazier notion of "cool" than the rest of the book deserves, built ion the exact sort of reductive logic behind videogame weapons that you mention. And if the rest of Asgard, excepting Loki, is a generic fantasy kingdom resembling the myths when we see it, then the "Big F***in' Hammer" is all the more bafflingly gratuitous.

I will agree, unfortunately, that the final chapter of Ultimates 2 flopped. It felt as though nobody on the creative or editorial teams wanted to keep doing the series, and they didn't think anyone in the audience still cared after all the delays, so they ditched any kind of complex resolution of the various plot threads in favor of a lot of splash pages involving shit being blown up.

Nevertheless, I would like to see a better comic in which " Iron Man Six " shows up.

" The man just goes for sensationalist and wretched almost every time out. Even Spider-Man in 1985 came off as a complete jerk to the kid. Ultimate Ben Grimm had some great moments but they were more than counterbalanced by the notion of him wanting to cut himself or whatever. There isn’t a likable person in Civil War. Not even close. Ultimate X-Men might be the worst of the lot. Everyone were young, edgy rebels. "

Well, of course they were young, edgy rebels. They were kids who'd been persecuted most of their lives for a genetic quirk. It's hard to be a good Boy Scout when the Scoutmaster's leading the charge with pitchforks and torches, while it's really easy to cast judgment from afar.

The Loki and Asgard stuff seemed as if it had been planned, but it was probably too much of a tonal departure from what went before.

Leaving aside hammers 'n' nail-ships, would you agree that U-Thor was meant to be a basically positive character, that is, to be the viewpoint-advocacy character in the series? Or was he meant as a satire of leftist thought just as U-Cap was a satire of conservatism and U-Tony a satire of neoliberalism?

" Leaving aside hammers ‘n’ nail-ships, would you agree that U-Thor was meant to be a basically positive character, that is, to be the viewpoint-advocacy character in the series? Or was he meant as a satire of leftist thought just as U-Cap was a satire of conservatism and U-Tony a satire of neoliberalism? "

Satirical in the first volume, since he was very clear about the terms on which he'd help the other Ultimates ( there's a few hundred people in Heaven wishing you'd arrived to fight the Hulk BEFORE Bush doubled the foreign aid budget, Mr. Thorlief). Regardless of which side of the fence he was on, he was serving an agenda just as much as the others.

He seems played straight in the second volume, unfortunately. That he was right about everything and not just an Awful Link of the Day with stolen hardware removes the moral ambiguity, and it's not like the Ultimate Universe would have suffered from a phony Thor ( since almost all the cosmic/deity stuff in the UU has flopped ).

If it’s satirizing the stuff you’re describing, in the end all of that is not merely swept aside but actually valorized.

Well as Chad mentions, whether it is satirizing politics or superheroes, it flips and flops it's point of view throughout.
The first arc is definitely about American politics... mass spending on a team - based around glories from the past - put together to fight off potential threats - after a one off attack - and after just going on talk show after talk show, until it starts to lose public faith and ends up fighting an enemy of it's own creation?
In retrospect you can point out where it's different and such, but in 2002/3, it seemed like straight up political commentary.

In fact, I'd say the only arc that isn't commentary is the second act of volume one, the aliens - and it's the only one that doesn't paint the team as next to useless, self-obsessed, full of broken personalities and open to easy manipulation.
And this may be unfair, as it's not in the actual text, but Millar has said that arc was about him wanting to give them one kick-ass battle where they are clear cut good guys and get a massive victory.
(Possibly interesting note - the only clear victory they have, totally controversy free, and where they are the good guys all the way through is against Nazi aliens - left over from World War Two... that sounds like someplace I know...)

The other three arcs I saw as straight up, if occasionally muddled commentary (that's Millar for ya!) on American politics (from the outside looking in) - at the end of the last issue of course if the team deciding that to be a group of actual superheroes and a force of good, they have to separate themselves from the military
(And remember, in the MU Shield is a U.N organisation, whereas in the Ultimate Universe it's part of the American Military - that's an odd/interesting choice the creators made, not only did they change it's standing, they actually bucked the trend of globalizing everything in fiction, such as GI JOE becoming international, and made it specifically part of one governments military).

Which is interesting because his Ultimate X-Men had the 'happy' ending of the team being accepted by the people, but with the slightly ominous add on that they were now part of the military and open to influence from them.
(Which was of course then pushed aside by writers coming on the book for an arc, changing it all around and then leaving, which pretty much killed off any interest I had in that title - one would kill a character, the next would decide they didn't really want to deal with it and introduce new characters, the writer after that would decide they didn't like the new characters etc.)
In fact back in the day, it seemed to have disappeared before I got bored with the book, there was the overlying threat to Spiderman that as soon as he turned eighteen, he would be forced to join Shield and become their property... whether he wanted to or not.
Did they ever end up building upon all this anti-military vibe going on in the Ultimate books?

Of course it matters if a character is likable. If the industry and fandom hate heroes this much why even bother?

Super powered assholes don't impress me. Someone with that power who is trying to protect people no matter how difficult it can often make their own lives, that's as interesting as it is admirable. Not to mention fun but oh wait I forgot, in modern comics we're supposed to be above fun.

Am I the only one who enjoyed the Ultimates comics? I mean volume 1 & 2 and not that Jeph Loeb crap that followed. I found the characters interesting because they were different and I enjoyed the book because it wasn't the same old stuff we've been reading all our lives. I really didn't care much for Ultimatum as it seems to have killed off a lot of good characters. I'll check out Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Comics: Spider-man but the stories will have to improve to keep me reading.

PS. You guys seem aweful worried about the size of Thor's hammer. I'm sure there's a joke in there about it not being the size of his hammer but how he uses it.

" Did they ever end up building upon all this anti-military vibe going on in the Ultimate books? "

Not really, since almost all of the books were derailed into their own continuity baggage, with Ultimates taking the fall the hardest. Still, in the side-projects, there were some unique ideas...

-- Ultimate Origins' retcon that mutants are the result of the Super-Soldier-Program's genetic experimenting in the Second World War makes it so that Magneto's Brotherhood is largely the US military's fault, for first creating super power and then trying to persecute the powered individuals. It also gives the first arc of the Ultimates new meaning, since Magneto's attack on DC in the first Ultimate X-Men story inspired Fury to put a team of non-mutant superheroes together.

-- Ultimate Six goes even further in revealing that all of Spider-Man's villains owe their powers to the Super-Soldier Serum; it's made clear that SHIELD makes all other genetic tampering illegal, but it still happens. One could consider villains like Electro and the Sandman as fallout from the Super-Soldiers, similar to how the Tommy gun ended up in the hands of gangsters in the 20's.

-- Warren Ellis' Ultimate Human has some expansion on Britain's Super-Soldier program; Pete Wisdom questioned the use of UK Superheroes and argued that their superhuman arms should be much more covert. When they didn't comply, he tested his enhanciles on himself, and became the Leader ( his enlarged cranium giving him telekinesis but removing his ability to walk ). From there his antipathy towards American superheroes turned into outright hatred, particularly against Iron Man and the Hulk ( both of whom, Wisdom felt, wasted their gifts as a drunken playboy hero and a imbecilic monster ).

-- Ellis' Galactus saga didn't do the military-industrial stuff as much, but the ending, with Fury crowing about how he feels like he could take down God Himself after defeating Galactus, was downright creepy.

I've always seen Millar as being a very good Ideas man. He does genuinely come up with some interesting, intelligent and quite novel concepts in some of his books and he is a good creator of really cool moments.

The trouble is his narrative work, which Chad quite rightly says doesn't really hold true in the Ultimates or most of his books. It's sometimes very sloppy and his character dialogue needs improvement (Everyone sounds cold and harsh regardless of personality). In all he needs to focus more on telling a cohesive story and getting across his ideas within the structure and themes of his stories rather than a book composed of cool moments that has splatterings of political, social and whatever other ideologies and allegories spouted shallowy by his cool sounding characters.

Saying that, I always make time for his new stuff because I always know he is going to have some great idea, moments or plot twists that are worth reading. The Ultimates was a clever twist on the big twos superhero books and created some great concepts. I just wish he didn't write it in the adolescent action movie style he does and gave it some structured depth.

I think we can all agree thought that no matter what we thought of Millar's Ultimates, it was way better than Loeb's.