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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 ).

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?

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.

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

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.

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 ).

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.

Are they interesting is the most pertinent question.

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?

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…