Empire; The Ultimates, vol. 2
More graphic novels! Like the last batch, both Mark Waid’s Empire and Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, vol. 2 are explicitly superhero books; but they’re superhero books with a political twist.
The political side of Empire is fairly obvious — the premise is that a super-villain has, for once, succeeded in his goal. He’s taken over the world and rules as dictator. So… now what? Despite the super-powerful premise, the actual meat of the story is largely personal. Waid isn’t concerned about the effects that super-villainous domination has on the world; he’s concerned about the effects it has on the super-villain and the people around him. While it’s definitely not a modern classic, Empire is an enjoyable, above-average read due to the well-drawn, complex characters.
The Ultimates is closer to a conventional superhero book. On one level, this is an Ultimate universe reboot of the Avengers — it’s the story of a super-group featuring Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Wasp, and Giant Man. But, like all the Ultimate books, it’s been dehokified. This isn’t just a band of do-gooders who decided to join together in the purity of their hearts, it’s a media-savvy team put together largely for PR purposes by an intelligence arm of the U.S. government. And while Captain America is still noble and pure of heart, as befits an idealized World War II hero, the rest of the crew is a bit less so. Bruce Banner obviously has some issues, Giant Man’s a wife-beater, Iron Man’s more than a bit feckless, Thor’s a hippie (and his purported divine status is considered by the other characters to be an eccentricity), and so on. This could have played out as nasty and cynical, but (one really horrible France-bashing line of Captain America’s aside) it doesn’t. I don’t know how well the book’s narrative will be sustained over a longer run, but so far, it’s right up there with Ultimate Spider-Man in the top echelon of superhero comics.
Comments
Mark Millar leaves me completely cold. Everything I’ve read by him gives the impression of straining for cool. You know, “Hey, wouldn’t it be really radical if Jenny Sparks met ADOLF HITLER! Yeah, Hitler! Cool! And like, she knew him when he was an artist! Wow, I can’t believe I’m going to write a comic with HITLER in it! That’s gonna shake things up around here!” “Hey! What if the Authority fought, like, The Avengers! But they were bad guys! The fan boys’ heads will explode!” “Oh, oh, I know! I’m going to mention Freddie Prinze in my comic! Take THAT, MTV!” Its the kind of lazy ‘transgression’ Alan Moore was satirizing ten years ago…
Oh, so we’re back to the post-Dark Knight/Watchmen era then, where we onece again discover that superheroes are, like, so cheesy man and they should be more like the movies.
Marvel’s Ultimate line hasn’t decheezed, just swapped one sort of cheese for another, quite stinky one, in the process once again feeding on the corpses of Kirby, Lee and Ditko (you know what i mean…) in yet another lame attempt to sell the same overhyped warmed up shit by flogging the dead horse to this generation of fanboys.
Hey, Ultimate Fantastic Four is so realistic, they call Dr Doom “Van Damme”.
Whoo.
Memo to all prospective comics writers: 1) you’re not Alan Moore 2) accept that cheesiness is an integral part of the superhero genre and use it to your advantage 3) stop reworking the same old tired concepts abd find something new.
Memo to prospective artists: learn to draw, draw what serves the story, not just the pinups you’d like to draw.
Funny, I could have written this rant in 1995.
You could have, and it’d actually have been on-point, then.
Oh, so we’re back to the post-Dark Knight/Watchmen era then, where we onece again discover that superheroes are, like, so cheesy man and they should be more like the movies.
Marvel’s Ultimate line hasn’t decheezed, just swapped one sort of cheese for another, quite stinky one, in the process once again feeding on the corpses of Kirby, Lee and Ditko (you know what i mean…) in yet another lame attempt to sell the same overhyped warmed up shit by flogging the dead horse to this generation of fanboys.
Hey, Ultimate Fantastic Four is so realistic, they call Dr Doom “Van Damme”.
Whoo.
Memo to all prospective comics writers: 1) you’re not Alan Moore 2) accept that cheesiness is an integral part of the superhero genre and use it to your advantage 3) stop reworking the same old tired concepts abd find something new.
Memo to prospective artists: learn to draw, draw what serves the story, not just the pinups you’d like to draw.
Funny, I could have written this rant in 1995.
I will probably never read the book, but I just want to say that I love the idea of Thor as a long-haired hippie freak! Groovy, man!