Ultimate Spider-Man Issues # 1-7 Review

  I’ve got to admit after how big of a flop Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra and Elektra: Devil’s Due both turned out to be for me, I wasn’t exactly eager to jump into Ultimate Spider-Man.  I don’t know what it is but my entire life Spider-Man hasn’t ever really registered with me. I’d watch reruns of the old cartoons and while they were decent they never offered me much more than a way to pass 30 minutes.  The cartoon in the 90s was better so I guess there was that.  When I was younger I couldn’t have cared less about the comics (I was all about X-Men and Superman back then) and when I was a kid I’d always pick up the X-Men toys in the store and not even give any thing with a Spider-Man logo a second glance.  Don’t even get me started on the three live action movies.  The one good thing is that while I would never have willingly picked Spider-Man I didn’t have the same unnatural level of anger and revulsion that I do with Iron Man.

I know I’ve been doing the Ultimate Marvel reviews in a way that seems like I’m just going by the way the trade paperbacks are collected, but that’s not the case.  One thing I don’t ever enjoy is while I’m reading something and then out of the blue the writer decides to Retcon in an entire story that happened within the timeline previously but didn’t actually exist until the writer needs it as a plot device.  So I went into the Ultimate Marvel Universe with a promise I made not to read the stories in publishing order, but event order instead.

I like the idea of updating well established characters and making them more relevant to current times (but in my opinion DC Comics has done it better so far) Ultimate has been hit and miss so far.  However with a character like Spider-Man there are some things that have to be set in stone.  Peter Parker’s parents must be dead, he has to be raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben.  Peter has to be bitten by a spider in order to get his abilities, Peter has to have Uncle Ben taken away from him in a manner that Peter feels responsible for.  Peter has to work for the Daily Bugle and he has to be a freakishly smart geek.

That being said the first few issues of the series are basically a wash.  There are so many events that have to be set up before any writer can re-imagine Peter Parker’s universe it almost becomes pointless.  Sure there are a few things that can be changed but not enough to give it any real weight.  Like I said with the Elektra reviews this is another case of a writer using a plot that has been used time and time again only to just put their own spin on it.  Ultimate Spider-Man’s origin issues aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel, but at the same time they’re not trying to turn him into something it was never supposed to be.  I want to be fair though because this is Brian Michael Bendis that we’re talking about, I just wish that we can see more of him unrestrained and that we can move away from the issues being credited as “Writer Brian Michael Bendis from original material by Stan Lee.”

While I’m willing to stick this out because I trust Brian’s writing ability the art on the other hand….  I know that Mark Bagley was with the series for a long time, he was onboard until issue #111; his style just isn’t my cup of tea.  I don’t mind it so much when he’s drawing Spider-Man, but when it comes to the unmasked characters like Ben, May, Mary Jane, Liz, Peter and Harry they all seem just a bit off.  It’s not a lot, but there’s something about them that’s just different enough to look funky, and not the good kind of funky.  The one good thing about the art style is that this is one of the few times that we aren’t treated to a rendition of Mary Jane Watson that looks like she belongs on the cover of a low budget porno movie.  I’ve never been a fan of the over sexualization of female characters in comic books; if I wanted nothing more than sexy women doing weird things to fight mutant space aliens I’d just set my dvr to record everything that airs on Cinemax after 2am every night.  But as weird as it sounds I’m kind of afraid of how The Black Cat will be represented once she finally makes her debut considering that she was always supposed to be the ‘overtly sexual bad girl.’

Rating this isn’t going to be simple since it is 7 stories overall just to tell the origin.  The pacing is a bit odd because some issues drag out a lot more and there’s so much focus on certain events that do nothing but bloat the story arch.  It could have been told in 4-5 max, yet it’s 7.

Issue #1 – Powerless: C -

Issue #2 – Growing Pains: C+

Issue #3 – Wannabe: B-

Issue #4 – With Great Power: C+

Issue #5 – Life Lessons: B-

Issue #6 – Big Time Super Hero: B+

Issue #7 – Secret Identity B

Overall Rating: C+

Ultimate Elektra: Devil's Due Issues 1-5 Review

 

I continue my journey through the Ultimate-verse today and it brings me to Elektra: Devil’s Due; which serves as a sequel to Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra. While the second outing into Ultimate Elektra’s history is a lot better than the first mini-series the follow up isn’t without its faults; some of which are intentional some aren’t, and some are just victims of the plot device.

Most of the cast from the first mini-series is back, obviously Elektra, her father and Matt return for this run. Foggy is back too, this time with a little more to do than simply being Matt’s college roommate and tag along, on the flip side Phoebe is back only to be reduced to a brief cameo like appearance in which she serves as a decoy for all of two seconds. Trey is no where to be seen or mentioned and neither is Melissa which I find odd considering the events surrounding those two characters were the catalyst for Elektra’s actions as well as the conflict between her and Matt.

While I complained in the first mini-series about Melissa and Trey having too much time and energy devoted to their plot I actually found myself wanting to read a little about what happened to them. Even if I didn’t agree with the plot you just can’t build something up then never bring it up again. They sort of did the same thing with Phoebe, at the end of the first series she was furious with Elektra and now all of a sudden she had apparently gotten over her anger enough to be willing to risk her life for Elektra. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue if they simply stated how much time passed between the first mini-series and the second.

Another victim of plot devices happened to be Elektra’s father. In the first series after Trey had their dry cleaner shop and the home they lived in above it destroyed by arsonists they had to go to Elektra’s Sensei because they had no where else to go. Now to move the plot along in the second series Elektra and her father are suddenly flush with family, and not just family but ‘Family.’ So we’re stuck going through the motions with her father getting money from their family and the store being used as a front for the mob, nothing new here and it wasn’t even written in a way to make this particular point exciting.

Elektra continues to throw herself onto grenades for people she cares about and tries to work off a deal in order to work off her father’s debt. Eventually she meets Benjamin Poindexter aka Bullseye who was sent by the Kingpin to murder a man who was going to testify against her cousins and the Kingpin. Naturally the man was tied to the case Matt and Foggy were working on, so this causes Elektra to interact with him, more as Daredevil than Matt though. Elektra ultimately goes to the Kingpin and is forced to face off with Bullseye. As part of her deal since she defeated Bullseye the Kingpin will produce evidence that clears Elektra’s father’s name while implicating her cousins.

The series ends with Matt and Elektra more at odds than ever. He still wants to follow the law, and actually found a way to clear her father’s name that wouldn’t have involved her coming in contact with the Kingpin and now it appears that Elektra has earned a place inside the Kingpins organization.

I’m not sure what to think about this run. The pacing was a little better, but that’s because it had an extra issue to deal with that the first series didn’t. The writing is good, but considering they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just rehashing more overused plots and preexisting plots being sacrificed or simply thrown away just to move this new story arch along; the writing could be considered average. The art is okay, but a lot of the times the proportions seem a bit off, especially on the women in the issues, they seem to be pinched and bloated at the same time, but it’s not the overtly sexualized unrealistic art that’s quickly becoming the normal in comics. I don’t mind a bit of retroactive continuity but considering the first series ran from 2001-2002 and the second one ran in 2004; add to that the fact that anything in the Ultimate universe is sort of a combination of retcon and reimagining I think it’s a bit too soon to be changing the fact that Elektra and her father had no family in the first series, and suddenly is overrun with family in the second.

Devil’s Due was by far better than Daredevil and Elektra, but so far D&E has been the worst I’ve read (which is sad considering she’s my favorite character out of Elektra, Daredevil and Iron Man) the fact that Devil’s Due was better is kind of like saying it’s the best of the worst.

Rating: B -

Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra Issues 1-4 Review

My third stroll through the Ultimate Marvel Universe brought me through the origins of Elektra Natchios. Once again her origin has been ‘updated’ to become more accessible to different types of comic book readers. However unlike Iron Man’s new origin Elektra’s seems to work against her. Her mother’s death due to breast cancer caused her to become depressed so her father enrolled her in martial arts classes because she was a fan of Bruce Lee. Her father now is a simple dry cleaner who is just trying to make an honest living and have enough money to send his daughter to college.

That’s right; Elektra has been de-aged down to eighteen years old in order for them to be able to successfully play off the college freshman aspect of the story. We get a few supporting characters, which I find a bit odd. I don’t like the idea of Elektra having friends, a roommate or a support system; and in this case she has all three and that’s even before she meets Matt Murdock.

This is where the plot loses me it took away all of the best dramatic aspects of Elektra’s story and replaced them with a cross between a Lifetime TV Network’s movie of the week and a Lifetime Romantic Comedy. You have the love at first sight aspect with Elektra and Matt, even a slumber party type scene between Elektra and her two friends Phoebe and Melissa where they’re taunting her for having feelings for Matt. Thankfully the love-y dove-y aspect isn’t the main story line, but the b plot does drag out too long in my opinion.

The other plot is something that honestly I am sick of. It could be a good plot if done correctly but it just gets used way too much and it’s sort of the ‘go to’ plot in order to do female vigilante storyline. There is Trey Langstrom who is a stuck up entitled character who thinks he can do whatever he wants. He constantly harasses the females on campus until messes with Melissa, Elektra intervenes only to have Trey later attack and (it is implied) rape Melissa. Elektra is furious and takes Melissa and their friend Phoebe to her sensi in order to teach them self defense.

Trey’s family gets the charges dropped but Elektra doesn’t want to let it go. In order to teach her a lesson Trey hires two thugs to burn down her family’s dry cleaning business. Naturally Elektra’s father is inside, only he doesn’t die. She insists that it is Trey and is even more furious when he gets released from police custody yet again. Now we’re in for yet another over used plot device here, we meet Trey’s father who appears to be more abusive than Trey is. In the brief time we see him all he does is beat Trey around, yell at him, call him a failure and let him know how ashamed he is of him and essentially orders him to ‘take care’ of Elektra. Well Trey tries to attack Melissa again and this is ultimately the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The whole time unknown to Elektra Matt has been investigating the arsonists and Trey, so we do get a little bit of Matt’s early outings as Daredevil, if not his first outing. At this point I would rather have seen more of Matt than Elektra which is a shame because I am a huge Elektra fan – but this plot and her new origin does absolutely nothing for her at all.

We get a bit more action in the final issue of the four issue series which is good, but almost too little too late. Elektra set up an ambush in the park for Trey where she intended on killing him; they fight for a while, not long though considering Trey is no match for her. Just when Elektra is about to kill him the masked man that Elektra has been running into stops her, again we get more fighting – nothing really special there -. The masked man reveals himself to be Matt and that sends Elektra over the edge, she can’t stand that he lied to her and thinks he was lying about everything. The issue ends with Elektra stabbing Trey in an artery and giving Matt a choice: save Trey’s life or run away with her. Matt chooses to save Trey which leads us to Elektra vanishing but not before she leaves her father a letter, Melissa and Phoebe get one too, Matt doesn’t though, instead she leaves him flowers that were just like the ones she gave to him when they first officially met.

I wanted to like this, I really did; and I went in with high hopes after how much I liked the two Iron Man series but Elektra and Daredevil left me disappointed. It was like it was trying too hard to be more important than it actually was. I don’t get Elektra’s quest for vengeance for Melissa at all. It would have made more sense if Trey had attacked Elektra, the attack led her to become involved in the martial arts world, he gets off due to his family buying him freedom then he hires the arsonists and then Elektra goes after him. I have a hard time believing that this character who is supposed to be so ruthless and cold blooded was suddenly turned into a shy love sick teenager who all of a sudden wanted to murder someone because her friend got hurt. It was too drastic of a change in Elektra and it happened too quickly for it to work.

Rating: C -

Ultimate Iron-Man Volume 2 Issues 1-5 Review

Well I’m still in a Marvel state of mind so today’s review will cover Ultimate Iron Man Volume 2. Let’s get this out of the way already: ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m not a fan of Iron Man.’ Before we get into the plot I want to take a minute to talk about two things that bugged me. First off it’s a five issue mini-series just like the first volume, however for the first three issues of the series it is boldly displayed on the cover that it is ___ of FOUR and only on the fourth issue does it say that there is another issue coming out. When the story was first published I can imagine that being quite annoying, especially since I find it annoying and it’s been over three years since the 2006-2007 series first ran.

Another thing that bugged me was the art. I’ve never been a fan of this particular style (the first run of the Buffy comic series also dabbled in this style near the end of the run.) It makes it difficult to appreciate it the way it’s meant to be because it ends up being all over the place. One panel can look amazing and the next really gritty in a way that almost makes it look like it’s done by a different artist who is trying to simulate the style of the original. Granted this could possibly be the fault of the colorist and inker, in fact I’d place it more on their shoulders since it looks to be over stylized and textured when they’re trying to define where light meets shadow.

While the art appears to be a downgrade from the first volume the story is actually better. They still play up the dynamics between Tony and Obadiah but the whole soap opera aspect of the drama between their parents and the generation long family feud and attempted company stealing and the gold digging ways of Howard’s ex-wife Loni are gone. Instead we get new characters like Deloris and Whiplash, foreign terrorist plots, stolen nuclear weapons, Tony and Obadiah getting kidnapped and an assassination attempt on the imprisoned Howard Stark. There is definitely more action in the second volume than there was in the first, this is obviously because the focus clearly shifted from interpersonal struggle and family dynamic into dealing with the consequences of those things.

One thing I’m not too sure about though is the change in Tony’s origin. I know that Marvel launched the Ultimate line in an attempt to make their characters more accessible and relevant to the next generation of comic book fans, but that model doesn’t hold water here. In Tony’s ‘canon’ origin he has a heart defect that is made worse by his alcoholism, in Ultimate we have the very beginnings of Tony and his battle with the bottle – it can’t be that big of an issue since he’s still a teenager in the second volume – Tony’s heart defect is a thing of the past, instead replaced by altered DNA as a result of a lab accident.  I don’t know about you but I know a lot more people with heart problems than I do know people who had their DNA altered when their mother accidentally ingested blood from a genetically altered test monkey. How is that more ‘relevant’ and ‘accessible’ than someone with a heart problem? Seriously, can some one explain that to me?

I liked the twists and turns the plot, when the series was over I was left wanting to know what would happen with Tony and to see how the new dynamic would play out between Obadiah and Tony once Obadiah experiences his change of heart. Nifara’s death was abrupt and not really expected – it certainly shows that this isn’t your daddy’s Marvel comics, if you’re being held hostage you won’t get shot in the hand and then say ‘oww’ and act like nothing happened; in fact you’re more likely to be shot at pointblank range right between the eyes.

The main villain of the piece isn’t Deloris or even Whiplash; instead it turns out to be Loni. This somehow manages to work and not work at the same time. I can easily buy that Loni would be willing to sacrifice her own son and let him die in order to get money and power; I can buy her misguided passion fueling her hate for both of her ex-husbands for their inability to satiate her bank account. However I just can’t buy that she’s essentially the head of a terrorist cell and manipulating multiple factions just so she can get a hold of the armor suit and nuclear weapons. That’s where it lost me; a gold digger with aspirations of world domination is a little too hard to buy. Although the art makes her look a lot more like a generic knock off of Black Widow than how she looked in the first volume, the drastic change in appearance just ends up serving as more of a disconnect from the persona the character had in the first run.

This run had a little bit more flaws and ups and downs than the first run did but it still left me wanting more. I wanted to read more stories of the teenage Tony Stark. I wanted to see Rhodes’ reaction to Tony telling him that Loni brutally murdered Nifara. That’s saying a lot considering that I’m not a fan.

Rating: B-

Ultimate Iron-Man Volume 1 Issues 1-5 Review

For a while now I’ve wanted to get into Marvel Comics’ Ultimate line – unfortunately the longer I put it off the less likely it seemed that I would ever get into it.  That was until Marvel decided to launch a new title Ultimate X.  I picked up the first issue, and without going into detail I liked it but was left confused by what was going on because I hadn’t had any prior source material to read.  That was when I decided to go back and read the entire universe in chronological event order, which is different than the order the individual series were published in.

For those of you not in the know the Ultimate universe was, well to put it bluntly, Marvel’s attempt at making their properties such as X-Men and Spiderman (since they launched the universe) younger, more hip, grittier, more up to date with the way the ‘modern’ world is.  Essentially it was Marvel’s attempt at making themselves much more relevant in order to increase their fan-base. It must have worked, the line launched in 2000 with the previously mentioned Spiderman and X-Men and now near the middle of 2010 and the universe still exists and is publishing ongoing series: Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate X and has more ongoing series and mini series scheduled to come out later this year.

Like I said earlier I intend on reading the entire universe in story order, not publication order so I won’t be starting with either Ultimate Spiderman or Ultimate X-Men, I’ll be starting with the 2005-2006 Ultimate Iron-Man Mini Series Volume 1.  Honestly this starts off as a major problem for me since I make no apologies over my personal distaste for Iron-Man, Tony Stark and roughly 97% of his cast of characters.  Seriously all of this blog’s readers should start a drinking game and take a shot every time I say something negative about Iron-Man.  You’ll be drunk for half of the time I cover anything non X-Men in the Marvel Universe.

There are differences in Tony’s origin which personally work better for me.  His tissue is a ‘living brain’ due to his mother’s exposure to the blood of a monkey who was being used as a test subject.  A side effect to the ‘living brain’ aspect is that he is in constant pain, which is why he needs to armor to help ease the pain of his over stimulated neural cells.  Another side effect is that he can regenerate his limbs and heal from physical damage and injury.  I like this aspect of the character, and I really like that we got a peek into Tony as a young boy and a teenager; which again is the whole point of the Ultimate line.

The story doesn’t feature too much in the way of super-heroics or action; in fact it has more of a soap-opera quality to it for the majority of the five issues.  Tony’s father Howard is in the middle of a bitter divorce with his gold digging wife who is already with Zebediah Stane and they are attempting to take control of Howard Stark’s company.  They are ultimately successful in getting the company (at least for a while) only to find out that Howard never put anything on paper so the company is essentially worthless.  Howard begins a relationship with a brilliant scientist Maria Cerrera, Tony’s mother.  Like I said she gets the monkey’s blood in her mouth while she is pregnant with Tony, not much to go into here other than the fact that she dies in labor.  Howard arrives and places a blue substance that he had been developing on Tony to act as a biological armor.  The armor is what Zebediah was after all along.

To make a long story slightly less long Zebediah manages to track down Howard while he is on the run and kidnaps and tortures Tony.  Zebediah is taken into custody and remains there for several years. Years later Zebediah and Howard’s ex-wife comes to Howard announcing that she has left Zebediah (who is still in prison) and wants Howard to put her and Zebediah’s son Obadiah into a special school, he agrees and that’s the last we’ve seen of her.  Tony, now a teenager is going to a private school and befriends a young man named Rhodes who is being beaten up by a group of kids who were later hired as de-facto hit-men and told to throw Tony into the school’s furnace. They actually almost get away with it but Rhodes and his friend Nifara, partly in thanks to the suit of armor Tony had built wand was testing with Rhodes when they were attacked; manage to stop them and keep Tony alive until Howard comes along.

Howard convinces both Rhodes and Nifara’s parents to let them go to a new school along with Tony, this turns out to be the same school that Obadiah goes to.  They aren’t there long before Tony witnesses something truly horrific – Obadiah murders two other students by throwing them off of the building, he gets away with it too by claiming that the two students committed suicide.  This only helps to strengthen Tony’s resolve to make his suit of armor more effective.

That wasn’t the last of Obadiah’s evil acts though. He manages to get his imprisoned father brutally murdered apparently successfully frames Howard Stark for the murder.  Howard awaits trial for the crime he never committed and turns over control of the rebuilt Stark Enterprises to Tony, who has now turned to alcohol to help dull the pain of his altered neurological system.

The mini-series ends with Tony officially donning the armor to stop a ship at sea that has been taken hostage and is full of explosives, and the final panels are of an unconscious Tony being pulled from the water after the explosives detonated.

Now given that I’m not a fan of Iron-Man this was a weird one for me, especially since this story takes place first in the Ultimate line – it made for an interesting introduction.  Like I said I do like the twist on Tony Stark’s origin. The soap opera-esque subplot with the parents does move the story along but it also sort of makes it a totally different story as well. I enjoyed the fact that the mini-series ends with a cliffhanger without really being a cliffhanger.  I can only imagine that the wait for the second volume would have been difficult for the hardcore Iron-Man fans, especially given the fact that at the end of Vol. 1 Issue 5 they announce that there will be a follow up to the series, but that it would be a year away. I actually ended the first series and wanted to read the second volume, which is saying a lot.  If the second volume is anywhere near the same quality as the first volume I could imagine becoming a fan of Iron-Man, Ultimate Iron-Man that is.

Rating: B