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The Ultimates 2

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BrianFitzgerald

12:20 / 13.04.07

Ultimates 2 # 13 in stores May 16th

The Newsarama article linked above includes an image of an eight-page foldout gatefold from the issue, full of battlefrenzy goodness, and states that the issue checks in at 46 pages, with a wraparound cover and $3.99 price.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

12:48 / 13.04.07

Hmm, I wonder if Millar will end this one on a 'Tony as mastermind behind the whole shebang' tip? 'Cause on the evidence of this it just looks like another issue of punchy punchy.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

13:31 / 13.04.07

46 pages...in Ultimate terms, that might even be a half-hour read. And yet...after that last issue, published in -- what, 1945? -- and after the annual that spoiled the ending, well. I just can't justify buying that.

Apparently, I'm a very surly comic book geek this morning.

19:02 / 13.04.07

First one to make a "Let's Ragnarok... And Roll" joke gets a shiny 10p piece.

Also, I like the detail that in the middle of all this Mass Carnage, there's still Betty Ross and Nick Fury standing, very small, with guns blazing, while everything rages on in huge around them.

Phex: Dorset Doom

19:43 / 13.04.07

So... Orcs. That's what they're giving us here, after all the delays and all the criticism the final battle is against Orcs.
And doesn't the fact that there are now Orcs and Trolls and big fuckoff Fenris Wolves and Norse Gods kinda break the Ultimate Universe, which is supposed to be a version of the regular Marvel U without all the silliness?

05:28 / 14.04.07

Orcs are sillier than Spider-Man or the new psychotic Nightcrawler? How now brown cow?

11:32 / 14.04.07

a version of the regular Marvel U without all the silliness?

Serious gamma monsters! Serious robots!

17:27 / 14.04.07

Well... I'm intrigued to see how they end it, and thus will be shelling out the shekels, most probably, but it's got to the point where, in some ways, I just don't care any more.

Not that that has any impact on the universe at large, or matters in any significant way, but... meh.

Essential Dazzler

18:09 / 14.04.07

I hope everyone is !super! !excited! about the prospect of Thor talking like 616 Thor In Jeph Loeb's run.

18:49 / 14.04.07

I know I am.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

19:32 / 14.04.07

I want them to retire and have sensible lives, maybe learn a thing or two about not being TOUGH!BASTARDS! all the time, particularly Cap, I worry that Cap needs to see a therapist but doesn't have the will and courage to say so. He seems so angry a lot of the time. Thor needs to look up that pretty pink-haired ULTIMATE!Jane Foster who was a member of his following and take her up to the rainbow bridge.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

10:04 / 15.04.07

When I first read papers' post above, I thought ze'd recommended Thor 'take her up the rainbow bridge'.

Not sure if I'm glad I'm wrong or not.

12:10 / 15.04.07

I'd like to see them send Cap back in time so that he could experience the decades he missed. During the 50s, he could be a hardboiled private eye.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

13:43 / 15.04.07

I wonder if the Orcs, and wolves and stuff are really real? I mean Loki seems to be able to manipulate reality, so it's possible there just illusions of the like made by him. Not that they'd really be any more over the top than much of the stuff in Carey's Ultimate Fantastic Four if they are actual Orcs.

I'm half looking forward to this - the last couple of issues have been kinda dissapointing, but I've enjoyed most of Millar and Hitch's run, and it'll be nice just to have it finished and done.

14:03 / 16.05.07

final issue, complete with an 8-page gatefold section, today!! Is it just me, or is there a new trend with gatefold pages/sections -- first, All-Star Batman's section with the batcave, then JLA #7's gatefold, now this...? I guess they keep trying to outdo themselves...

Essential Dazzler

14:21 / 16.05.07

As expected, it's difficult to have any reaction other than "meh" to this issue, it's a massive cop out I know.

I'm sure when I reread it in a while it'll be alright, but the liberators arc was just poo, made even worse by never being worth the wait.

I am very glad [+] [-] Spoiler wasn't sure they'd let that happen.

That epilogue was fairly pointless and un-affecting too.

Spyder Todd 2008

23:43 / 16.05.07

I kinda disagree, I was surprised in a pleasant way that in the end they took it all back to the beginning with Cap. But hey, different strokes.

13:33 / 17.05.07

Wanda asking out/flirting with a robot exoskeleton/early model Vision?? lol. I can see Wanda falling in love with the Vision who looks like a man, shows bravery and valor, etc. in the 70s Avengers comics, but why on earth would Wanda fall in love with a thing that looks like the Terminator when its stripped down to it robotic skeleton? (it also looks a bit like John Byrne's old character ROG-2000 if anyone knows that old chestnut)

Plus, you've got Ultimate Girly Robot Vision as well as Vision Mark II (or did Millar call it Ultron? It wouldn't have made sense to call him Ultron, since Wanda doesn't fall in love with Ultron, silly) over the pages of The Ultimates.

13:45 / 17.05.07

It wouldn't have made sense to call him Ultron, since Wanda doesn't fall in love with Ultron, silly

The Ultimate Marvel-verse does have an occasional tendency to mix things up a bit though. Gender switches (Mad Thinker, Vision), heroes into villains (Longshot), that kind of thing.

I have a feeling though that Millar didn't know about the Ultimate Nightmare storyline when he included that little moment.

Keith, like a scientist

15:18 / 17.05.07

Wanda was shown to be a little sexually odd in all of her interactions with Pietro, so this is probably Millar's "sex with robots!!" fantasy angle on her.

All in all, I enjoyed the whole Loki/Vikings/Orcs/Fenris/Thor battle stuff. it was suitably big and huge and ridiculous... it all looked cool, and that's kind of what Ultimates is about in the end...

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

17:09 / 17.05.07

I definitely wanted a little less "Thor hitting Loki in the head with a hammer" and a little more "Thor figuring out something he'd been missing the whole time". it kind of felt to me like he was getting set up to learn/grow somehow and in the end he just got his ass kicked despite how holy he was, and then later prayed some more and suddenly got fixed up. or something. was Wanda summoning him more important than it seemed? there wasn't really any kind of explanation.

also the big Ragnarok battle lost a lot of the impact it might have had, only because we'd just seen the exact same thing with slightly more human-looking bad guys, about an issue ago. or an issue or two before that, only with the roles reversed.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

19:48 / 17.05.07

This was actually...good. Enjoyable. I dunno about the gatefold gimmick, I think my brain got tired trying to process what is essentially just a battle poster...but I do very much love Ultimate Thor. That and the saucy robot flirting.

04:44 / 21.05.07

I thought it was a little "eh" overall; bit of a letdown, especially on the Thor front. And I was not fond of the coda scene set in WWII, either.

I'm very curious as to where Loeb will go with the series, but that Maduiera guy seems to have gooten a rather scant headstart on the - what? - year and a hald since it was announced he was on the book. I'm more stoked for McGuiness, but god knows when that'll come out if V3 is going to veer off schedule.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:23 / 21.05.07

If you're looking forward to the McGuiness-drawn Ultimates, you might as well go read the Maximums issues of Superman/Batman.

I'm not honestly sure how they could have made the story any more satisfying as a conclusion - I've noticed that Millar always seems to hit anticlimatic notes with his big battle sequences, shuffling us on to the aftermath where the Ultimates are usually hanging out while whatever city they're in is in ruins. It's even worse with all the delays - I seem to recall Bruce hulking out and beating on the Crimson Dynamo but there any resolution to that? Is the Hulk just running around now but they don't care because they've already got Hank in the cells and it's only one member down there at a time?

17:30 / 21.05.07

John Byrne would have no problem with a hott babe like the Scarlet Witch falling in love with a robot, FW.

Aside from that, this was ... all right, I suppose. It seems to have been conceived as a showcase for Bryan Hitch's art, but seeing as it appears to have caused him a certain amount of personal discomfort (according to Mark Millar, over on Millarworld, Bryan Hitch's income over the last couple of years has been about a third of what it would have been if he'd been working on anything else) I wonder if it was worth it. As a series, it hasn't exactly been short of mega splash page blow-outs, so was the gatefold effort here really necessary, especially since (I'm guessing) a reasonable chunk of the audience got into trouble with the spread, and then decided to just skip it? At least, I know I did. Arguably, Mark Millar could have usefully spent the eight extra pages on the sort of close characterisation 'The Ultimates' has been good at, IMVHO, so dealing with the Banner issue, and so on. As it is, script-wise, it read like an afternoon's work which translated into months of hellish missed deadlines for Hitchy, his pal.

It's been a great series, I think, but one that's sadly fallen a bit at the last hurdle thanks to some frankly lazy writing. So, a shame, then.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:52 / 21.05.07

Grams: I wonder if it was worth it. As a series, it hasn't exactly been short of mega splash page blow-outs, so was the gatefold effort here really necessary, especially since (I'm guessing) a reasonable chunk of the audience got into trouble with the spread, and then decided to just skip it? At least, I know I did.

I tried to pull it all out and look at it but it was just a really big faux-LOTR orc-battle with super-heroes. It didn't even have the sheer geeky cameo appeal of, say, an Infinite Crisis spread. Having read the issue over again once since I bought it, I haven't even bothered looking at it.

As it is, script-wise, it read like an afternoon's work which translated into months of hellish missed deadlines for Hitchy, his pal.

How good is Hitch at holding to deadlines, typically? Having spent some time recently rereading the Waid/Hitch run of JLA, I was so impressed with the fluidity and energy of his work there that it seems a shame he's been focusing on Ultimates (and let's face it, the Loki/orc battle stuff would make for a good JLA big guns story, if it was compressed rather than decompressed -- and written by someone not-Millar). That said, he had plenty of fill-in artists along the way (including a very nascent JHW3) and I'm left wondering if he needs to do more shorter term projects as his style develops and his attention to detail expands.

19:06 / 21.05.07

>> (according to Mark Millar, over on Millarworld, Bryan Hitch's income over the last couple of years has been about a third of what it would have been if he'd been working on anything else)

Was the point of this that Hitch is not making as much off The Ultimates as he would have made doing more covers of various X-Men books or other comics? I find this a bit hard to believe as I thought they paid the Ultimates creators a truckload since it's such a cash cow for Marvel. But I guess I could see where the lateness of the book interferes with profits in terms of Marvel making any consistent money on the thing, other than trades and movie deals and such...

20:19 / 21.05.07

FW;

For the whole grim saga, Millarworld is only a click or two away.

Basically, it seems as if Bryan, as a freelancer, is paid by the page, so if it takes him six months to complete a 23 page comic, as opposed to the couple of weeks it normally might do, it's going to impact somewhat disastrously on his income.

Not that the wee, anal rape-obsessed, Christian fantasist of Coatbridge, Scotland appears to gie a fleein'
crap aboot that!

Haus of Mystery

07:23 / 25.05.07

Worst comic of the year?
Why, yes, I think it was.

Uatu.is.watching

14:40 / 25.05.07

Oh come on, that Captain-Marvel-returning-from-the-dead-to-work-in-the-negative-zone-jail comic came out this year.

Essential Dazzler

14:59 / 25.05.07

To be honest I'm fairly surprised it's provoking any kind of strong reaction

Haus of Mystery

16:28 / 25.05.07

The ultimates was a comic I enjoyed immensely - those first six issues are still fucking great - but this lazy mish-mash of superhero cliche and supposedly jaw-droppingly cool moments was totally piss weak by comparison. Therefore to me it was a very bad comic. One of the worst I've read all year. I didn't read the Cptain Marvel thing - didn't bother with any Civil War stuff, so it's badness is irrelevent to me.

17:09 / 25.05.07

>>>Basically, it seems as if Bryan, as a freelancer, is paid by the page, so if it takes him six months to complete a 23 page comic, as opposed to the couple of weeks it normally might do, it's going to impact somewhat disastrously on his income.<<<

I think he'll be able to make that up with original art sales, however. His Ultimates pages sell for a hell of a lot, as I recall - largely, I suspect, due to the amount of detail he puts into them that slows him down in the first place.

17:11 / 25.05.07

And there was that gatefold thing... which I really can't be arsed to talk about, in much the same way that I couldn't be arsed to open it up.

Another problem was that the comic repeated the formula of presenting the Ultimates with yet another army to fight. Millar managed to hackneyfy his own ideas

Haus of Mystery

17:52 / 25.05.07

The army of orcs was spectacularly duff. That's what I mean - the pacing was wildly off in this big hurried mess of an issue. Compare the artfully orchestrated Hulk ruck in the first arc to this. Basically, an exposition heavy battle scene with no verve or imagination - just superfolk charging at each other. Yawn.

No, no, this really was a turd. It didn't spark my imagination in the slightest.

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