Marvel Review of Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum
October 30, 2014 4:05 pm | 1 Comment
Review of Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum
Writer – Jeph Loeb
Artist – Joe Madureira/ David Finch
It’s the characters! – Stan Lee
Yes, it certainly is, or was, as Loeb seems to take iconoclasm to a gratuitous level. I can accept one, maybe two, characters getting killed in this series, but the carnage on display here is actually bewildering. The tone is not so much darker, but arguably the Hyde to Millar’s Jekyll, with visceral immolations and even cannibalism setting the tone of this rather nasty run. I don’t know if Loeb was struggling with a personal crisis at the time of writing, but the way he treats the characters in these books, in terms of story and dialogue, suggests something close to contempt.
This reviewer doesn’t want to give away specifics to address the problems with Loeb’s descent into morbid sensationalism, but can reveal that a couple of characters’ deaths are given a grisly and callous treatment. I’m no fan-boy (I know what works for the screen and what works for comics, for a start), and I do think it’s brave to kill off as many characters as we see in these volumes, but there’s a way to do this, and Loeb falls hopelessly short of justifying many of the bloody murders in either book. For the Ultimates run to recover, any subsequent writer would require a good couple of books of readjusting the characters to some sense of normality, with some experiencing severe post-traumatic stress. This is down to a rather cavalier disregard for the ‘victims’ of Loeb’s pen, whose deaths are cheapened by the nihilistic attitude and shock value of their sudden ends. Here is a writer who seems intent on bastardising other people’s creative efforts in spite of, under Millar and Hitch, the Ultimates having promise and paralleling developments in the cinematic universe. If Loeb’s work was to be converted to celluloid, it would probably be under The Asylum productions rather than Disney.
Let’s look at the writing. It’s cringe-worthy. Many lines of dialogue make the reader wince. One immediate example is genius Hank Pym expanding on Jan’s role as ‘Ultron’s mother’. He says during the confrontation with the stringless one, that he is the ‘mother xxxxer’. Exactly what Jan wants to hear, exactly what the fourth smartest man in the universe would say, and exactly what the reader imagines they would say, in that situation. Yes, it’s that bad.
Valkyrie is perhaps the most embarrassing example of a fawning teen lover I’ve read in fiction, and her dialogue is valley-girl cliché. Reed Richards, the intellectual paragon of the Marvel-verse, is reduced to an annoying, badly-drawn bespectacled brat with a stretched neck, piping up only when other senior figures finish giving their opinion. Doctor Doom, arguably the greatest villain in the Marvel pantheon is, particularly in the second book, reduced to an uppity trick-or-treater. There is such an abundance of muddled and lazy writing that doesn’t suit the characters that you seriously consider how the book made it to print. This is writing at its worst; the story is crude and nihilistic, the sense of adventure is missing, heroes are suicidal, villains are disheveled and cowardly, and the narrative pacing unwieldy, disjointed and fragmented. It is sad to see this level of storytelling from the publisher that gave us so many characters we could both identify with as well as look up to.
Say it ain’t so! Sorry Stan…
written by Tom West
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Tags: David Finch, Jeph Loeb, Joe Madureira, Marvel, The Ultimates, Tom West, Ultimatum
Categorised in: Comic Reviews
This post was written by Leftover Brian
Yeah, I some how read three issues of that tripe. It felt like a immature teenager snuck in and rewrote everything. So sad from the guy who gave us the long Halloween.