Comics Fondle

So all Millar needs is a double issue and he’ll take time?

Well, he doesn’t exactly take time. He writes an epilogue… lots of epilogues.

It’s a decent issue, a good popcorn read… though, wouldn’t eating popcorn while reading a comic book get your fingers greasy and damage the comic, reducing the value.

The positives come from the characters; again, Captain America doesn’t qualify yet and the Wasp does a turnaround on him and the end suggests some nooky (I guess he doesn’t know she’s a mutant yet… again, the hospital didn’t notice the little eggs?), so maybe next series he’ll have a character.

Great stuff with Thor and Iron Man, at least during the battle scene. However, Tony hitting on Laura Bush is, not surprisingly, weak. Millar really forces his “real world” humor and it almost always fails.

The Hulk saving the day, while neat, is way too easy.

And Millar brings it around… relatively. It’s a big huge fight scene with the fate of the solar system in the balance so maybe he gets some easy melodramatic points (he sure doesn’t score anything with the Captain America versus Nazi Skrull punch-out, not until the whole “A for America” thing, which doesn’t really sit well figuring Captain America’s from the 1940s and not a Neo-Con, but whatever… no one ever said Millar thought before he wrote).

The best moments of the comic–when the soldiers mock Iron Man’s sacrifice, for example–are sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. Thor, again, has the best lines in the comic. Millar never doing an Ultimate Thor series is his undoing, creatively speaking. For whatever reason, he writes him leagues better than anyone else.

I’m having some trouble with Captain America as a brilliant strategist too… shouldn’t have he won WWII earlier then?

Oh, good grief….

Have you seen Independence Day? Or any of the millions of Body Snatchers type movies?

Millar has.

I know, I know, I’m reading too much into The Ultimates, but come on… Millar’s got thirteen issues and he doesn’t do anything with this one. Seriously, I don’t think Marvel can say anything bad about Jim Shooter, because Millar’s not much different (I do absolutely love how they’re Skrulls though, which means all Bendis did was recycle Ultimates for Secret Invasion). There’s nary an honest moment to be seen in this issue.

The end, the rallying speech from Captain America, about as well written as Bill Pullman’s Independence Day rallying speech.

I think some of my… hostility comes from Ultimates being a decent concept–at least as far as an Ultimate Universe team book goes–and Millar faking “real world” with soap opera histrionics and mean-spiritedness.

Two left.

Sigh. An all-action issue. Not even an action-packed all-action issue. It’s a non-action-packed all-action double cross issue.

The Wasp’s twenty-six? Really? She’d have been nine when St. Elmo’s Fire came out, which makes it an awkward pop culture reference. It’s funny, but it doesn’t hold up to any thought whatsoever. Oh, wait, I just summed up the series.

The big shocker at the end of the issue is the Nazi villain Captain America used to fight is back. It’s weird how Millar doesn’t really give Captain America a character here, he just lets him be defined by his actions, never really having any thoughts.

Lots of vehicles for Hitch to draw this time. I think he digs drawing vehicles. It’s a decent scene, the sky full of S.H.I.E.L.D. ships. I don’t know… I can’t get excited at this point.

Nice Thor moments though.

When did the Soviet Union fall?

Let’s check wikipedia. Ah, 1991.

So Hawkeye has been in S.H.I.E.L.D. for over eleven years, putting him in his thirties somewhere, I assume. Shame Hitch draws him in his mid-twenties.

Actually, if it hadn’t been for that last line about the Soviet Union, I was going to open with how unpleasant it is to read Hawkeye in Ultimates, since (I think) he just ends up getting tortured and killed anyway.

I don’t know what happens this issue. They get ready to go attack the aliens, Captain America strikes out with Janet. Oh, the fight. Captain America versus Giant Man. Once it becomes clear Captain America’s going to kick ass, the fight’s over. Boring.

Millar’s playful approach to Tony’s alcoholism is cute. It’s funny how that problem’s a joke, but spousal abuse isn’t (if Millar was really thinking, he’d have Janet beat up Hank).

See, if you make the Nazis aliens… you can sell your comic books easier to Germans….

Millar’s “Secret Invasion” thing here–shocking he didn’t get mad at Bendis, also shocking there’s a big rip-off of a Men in Black moment–is a huge cop-out as far as real problems go. It’s sensational and bombastic, but it also gives the Ultimates an enemy who can be killed in hugely cinematic ways–just like The Matrix, which is another reference for the issue.

Sure, Millar takes the time to have Tony Stark “freak out” about alien invasions, but Hitch’s art’s static in the one panel with Stark freaking so it comes off as sarcastic instead of emotional.

The issue ends with Captain America getting ready to beat the crap out of Hank Pym, which may or may not just be Millar lifting the Jesse vs. Cassidy conflict from Preacher.

Eh.

Reading old DC comics–well, not old, but late seventies and early-to-mid eighties, I’m taken aback by the lame one issue villains they sometimes have. Gerry Conway did a lot of these on his Batman run, as far as I can tell. This issue of Captain America shows Marvel did it a lot too and, well, worse.

This issue opens with Cap breaking into the West Coast Avengers mansion or compound or whatever–it’s a chance to hype the coming West Coast Avengers series presumably–and then he gets into this long fight scene with a new villain, the Mexican-American Armadillo, who works for a super-mad scientist who no one seems to have heard of before and it kicks off some melodrama.

The writing’s competent (the end’s lame though, real lame) but the art’s awful. Cap’s face is often incomplete (no nose).

What a strange comic.