I had a busy weekend, so here, just look at these pictures

The weekend before last, I decided to try out this new pen I received as a gift a while back. I don't know much about pens and suchlike; most of the drawing I do is done in pencil, and then I trace over the good lines with a Pilot G-2 05, and erase the bad ones. This is a Faber-Castell PITT artist Pen B. Does that mean anything to anyone?

At any rate, it makes a line like a really nice marker, and it has a huge tip, about one and a half times longer than my normal pen.

(Above: Look at the size of that tip!)

I loved the way the way the lines it draws looked. Like, not that I was drawing anything yet, just if you drew a straight line on paper? It would be a really nice line. Provided you like the look of a straight black line on paper. Me, I love it.

So I stayed up about two hours later than usual, listening to/half-watching a Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD ("A Touch of Satan"; have you guys seen that one? Man, Emby Mellay is so hot, why wasn't she in any other movies?) while I pushed the pen around for a while, eventually moving from lines to the things I usually doodle—parrots, unicorns, rabbits, bald headed men—and ended up killing an hour or so just drawing pictures of myself with or as mythological creatures.

A couple weeks ago I read Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, which was pretty great (if you like C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and/or literary criticism, anyway). Miller wrote at one point that the faun character Mr. Tumnus was C.S. Lewis as a Narnian. I think that was the starting point...

Unicorns like apples. And virgins.


As a sphinx.

As another sphinx.

As a centaur.

With normal pen. See how much thicker and less squiggly the new pen's line is?

A few hundred more hours, and I think I'll be able to skip the pencil phase and switch to this new pen, so I can make big, fat lines like this all the time.

THE WHIZZER!

Why, what else could it be but...

And look at his hat! It's got funny little wings on the sides, which, okay, is kinda silly, but some superheroes make it work. But! It also has a little bird head coming out of the front of it!

I imagine it's probably supposed to be an eagle or some kind of heroic bird, but with the bird head and wings extending from his round head, it really makes it look like some kind of fat yellow chicken or duck, doesn't it?

And the best part?
In some of the panels it looks like the bird on his hat is actually speaking his dialogue.

Hey, wait a minute...

...where does Captain America hide his shield when he's wearing his Steve Rogers street clothes?



(Two-thirds of a page from the lead story in Marvel Adventures Super Heroes #12, written by Scott Gray and drawn by Matteo Lolli and Christian Vecchia)

Ultimates 3 #5

Previously in Ultimates 3: The team in the Savage Land joins forces with Ka-Zar, Shanna and their people to attack Magneto, Hank Pym rescues the Wasp from robots disguised as Iron Man and Captain America, Sabretooth and Hawkeye fight, Black Panther and Wolverine are attacked by the Juggernaut, Valkyrie is attacked by Mastermind and Pyro, Thor touches Unus the Untouchable only to be vanquished by Magneto, and Pym leads Wasp to the robotic villain living in their basement. (More here).

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So there’s been a lot of yelling and fighting sexing so far, but remember what the name of this story is? Er, yeah, it’s “Sex, Lies and DVD.” But remember what they changed the name to, for the purposes of the cover? Yes, that’s right, Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?.

It is time we find out, as our heroes Ant-Man and Wasp listen to the robot Yellowjacket record a report, which he addresses “to my creator Henry Pym.”

“You sought to provide androids to S.H.I.E.L.D. as a replacement for super soldiers," he says. "You called it Project Ultron.”

It’s true! He did! In Ultimates Vol. 2, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. This was when Pym was on the outs with the team for beating his wife and having ants attack her. Remember? He tried to give Fury some androids, and there was a scene where Scarlet Witch was talking to one, and Pietro was like, “Were you flirting with that machine?”

This was just a little Easter Egg type thing, since in normal Marvel Universe continuity, Wanda and android The Vision would fall in love, get married and I think maybe even have some magic kids or something…? It was so funny a joke, Millar re-used it at the end of the second volume, when Scarlet Witch asks an Ultron robot out on a date after they liberate America from the Liberators (on whose side Pym and the Ultrons fought

Or was it?

“Something happened to my original programming. Something…unexpected, Ultron/Yellowjacket says. “It was as if I were under some kind of spell. Improbable. Impossible. But…she was, after all…a witch.”

So Ultron fell in love with, and became obsessed with Wanda, even while he was demoted to a butler android in Ultimates Mansion. That’s right! There were androids serving drinks on the very first page!

It was Ultron who made and leaked the sex tape, and he created a Venom robot to capture the Scarlet Witch, which explains why Venom didn’t look like Ultimate Venom much.

There was some kind of flaw in Ultron’s design for his robot constructions though, so that when his robots were destroyed, they would melt. He knew Pym would notice, so Ultron drugged him. And then he used the time-honored trench coat and wide-brimmed hat disguise that Ben Grimm and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles use to walk unseen in New York City to trail Wanda and Pietro:

Not at all suspicious.

“It was a crime of passion,” Ultron says. “And no one suspected the butler did it.”

Considering that the murder weapon was a bullet programmed specifically to home in on Wanda’s D.N.A., and to also maybe be able to dodge or somehow compensate for possible super-speed interference from Quicksilver, that’s one well planned-out crime of passion.

On the fourth page of this explain-athon, Ultron talks about renaming himself Yellowjacket and to build robot versions of the Ultimates, and that his robot duplicates worked much better when he had live hosts to extract DNA from, which is why he has Tony Stark in a big basin of fluid.

Back in the Savage Land, Magneto is in the process of raining pink lightning on Shanna, Ka-Zar and their people, when Yellowjacket and his Ultimates attack. This seems contrary to his plan as he had previously announced it, to wait until Magneto and mutantkind’s war with humanity was over in order to claim earth for robotkind, but whatever, this book’s almost over, let’s just go with it.

Stowing away on Yellowjacket's shape is Tony “Iron Man” Stark, freed by the Wasp and Ant-Man, and wearing an all-black stealth suit which, we’ll see later, has War Machine-style gun shoulder-pad thingees.

“Elsewhere in The Savage Land,” Juggernaut is pounding on the Black Panther, whose costume is so torn up that now we can even see blond hair sticking out of his mask. Oh man, who is this guy?!

Juggernaut is about to say that “nothing can stop the Juggernaut” for like the third time in two issues, when all of a sudden he is impaled by the biggest fucking triceratops ever, and Wolverine, who is riding on it, quips, “Yeah, yeah, we know… last time I heard that one, I fell off my dinosaur.”

Wolverine is about to finish off Juggy—who apparently not even a triceratops in the gut can stop—when Black Panther catches Captain America’s shield (thrown by the about to arrive Iron Man) and then takes off his mask.

Oh my God! It’s Captain America! That’s why the two of them were never in the same place at the same time! (Except on covers). And that’s why Panther wouldn’t talk! And why Captain America was the only one who knew anything about Panther! And why Logan recognized the Panther even though he was disguised, because he could smell him!

Wasp is all, like, “You were the Black Panther? What the fuck, Captain America? That makes like no sense.”

And he says, “We’ll discuss it later, Jan.” This is a lie; it is not discussed later.

You may not remember, because I didn’t scan it or summarize it because there were so many crazy awful things happening that issue, but in the very first issue, Wasp asked Captain America why he didn’t respond when she called for him during the Venom attack episode, and he responded tersely that “I had to get a life of my own, Janet.”

See, he needed time away from The Ultimates, so, naturally, the best way to do this was to invent another identity so he could be an Ultimate in a different costume, or…yeah Captain America, that makes no fucking sense!

Back at the scene of Valkyrie’s attempted rape, Mastermind assures Pyro that his victims never wake up as he’s licking a crying, paralyzed Valkyrie’s face, when suddenly a mysterious figure appears in her hallucination about not being able to pay the rent. The figure explodes open the door behind which the landlord was just knocking, and says in a scratchy font, “I did not give you power so that you could die this day. We made a bargain. And you intend to keep it. Go now. Slay your enemies.”

Oh, so that’s why Valkyrie has powers now—she made a bargain with her landlord.

No, actually, it’s never revealed who the fuck this guy is. Wouldn’t want to tie up all the loose ends. Loeb might want to explore that in future issues of—oh yeah, this is the last issue of the series. Well, maybe in the next volume of the—oh, right, right. There is no next volume of the series. Huh.

Anyway, Valkyrie says “Men.” And then she chops off Mastermind’s head. And Pyro holds up his hands and tries to explain this wasn’t his idea, and she chops off both of his hands.

The Robo-Ultimates attack Magneto, causing him to lose his hold on Thor, whom he says he was holding “at the earth’s core.” Ultron informs Magneto that although he and his team are androids, there isn’t any metallic alloy on them. And then “KRAKA-THOOM” the real Thor appears holding his hammer, and he’s so pissed his back muscles are four times bigger than the last time we saw him.

Then the real Ultimates show up, Loeb walks away from his laptop, and a fourth-grade boy apparently climbs in an open window and scripts the dialogue for the next few pages.

Check this shit out:
Ha ha ha ha! Yellowjerk!

You know what we haven’t had this whole issue? A two-page splash!

Well, here’s one, featuring the two squads of Ultimates fighting. That’s followed by five panels checking in with each pair of combatants, in which terrible lines are spoken.

The Wolverine vs. Hulk panel is kind of amusing though. “I kinda wish you were the real Hulk. Me and him got unfinished business.” Wolverine says. This would have been published during Damon Lindeloff’s three-year break between issues of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk, see.

You know, Loeb may be a terrible, terrible comic book writer, and this may be the worst comic book every published by professionals (that I’ve read. I’ll try to follow up on some of your suggestions in the comments over the last few days). But at least he can write 22-pages of shitty comic every 30 days, and work in television simultaneously. It took Damon Lindeloff over three years to write about 132 pages of shitty comic (Well, the first half was pretty shitty; I gave up after the break, but it was basically just a fight comic. Lindeloff wasn’t writing From Hell or The Black Dossier or something requiring years of rigorous research).

Oh, wait, the dialogue gets worse than that last panel I scanned.

Yellowjacket tells Wasp that he’d rather not kill her, because “You’re almost like a mother to me.”

Ant-Man grows to human-size behind him, puts him in a headlock and says, "Then I guess that makes me--"
I…I don’t have words for this.

Okay, with Yellowjacket/Ultron’s head ripped off, the robots all collapse, and now it’s just Magneto staring down the Ultimates. While they’re talking, crazy old Hawkeye grabs a sharp piece of junk, shoves it into his crossbow gun, and shoots it at Magneto.

But, this:
Quicksilver takes it in the chest, saving his dad! He doesn’t use his super-speed to knock his dad out of the way, he doesn’t catch it, or put a piece of wood or rock or metal in front of it, he doesn’t even put a non-vital part of his body in front of it, he just uses his super-speed to get his chest in front of it.

Pietro is the world’s dumbest super-speedster.

As to why Magneto, using all his vaunted powers, couldn’t deflect the projectile, I wondered that myself upon the first reading, but there’s a pretty good chance that it was a piece of non-metal alloy taken from one of the destroyed Robo-Ultimates (The panel showing Hawkeye picking it up also features the robot Iron Man’s head on the ground next to it).

Magneto has now lost both of his kids to the Ultimates, and he’s so pissed that he uses his incredible powers that were unable to stop piece of plastic garbage shot out of a gun/cross-bow to lift his entire base up into the sky. Thor tires to give chase, but Magneto snatches his hammer from his hands and sends Thor hurtling to the earth below.

Here is Magneto, being very sad:
But what’s this? Pietro’s dead body is crying? Well then, obviously he’s not dead, right? Did Magneto not bother to take a pulse?

Well anyway, that’s the end of Ultimates 3 #5. We still don’t know who Valkyrie’s benefactor was, or where Pietro hid his sister’s body, or what’s up with his crying not-dead body, but hey, at least the question on the cover was answered. Ultron killed The Scarlet Witch.

Or wait, still one page to go…?
Oh yes, of course. It was Dr. Doom, a character who never appeared in the series at all, or was ever even mentioned in it, who was actually behind it all. That’s actually a pretty fitting end to this terrible, terrible comic book series.

********************

Next: There is no next, that’s the end! Thank God Loeb and Madureira didn’t actually do the 12 issues of this volume that was originally announced, huh? I know Loeb follows this up with Ultimatum, which is still ongoing, and thus unavailable to borrow from the library for a few months yet, but I suppose I’ll check that out when it is available. If anything has a chance of taking the Worst Comic Ever crown from Ultimates 3, Ultimatum sure seems like a contender.

Or maybe I’ll see about tracking down Ultimate Power, once I recover from this week.

Ultimates 3 #4

Previously in Ultimates 3: Wolverine flashbacked up the joint, explaining how this one time he had sex with Wanda and Pietro’s mom and then a jealous Magneto magnet-ed him down a mountain, then he explained how Wanda made all the dinosaurs in the Savage Land through magic to stop him from killing Pietro, and how he watched as Pietro and Wanda discover a kind of love that “no one in this room can really understand” (because it is incest), Wolverine and most of the team traveled to the Savage Land to recover Wanda’s body from Magneto and there they met Ultimate Ka-Zar, Ultimate Shanna and Ultimate Zabu, and, back in New York, Iron Man revealed himself to be a robot who captured The Wasp (More here).

*******************

And now, the penultimate issue of Ultimates 3, and this one is all fight. Except for a dumb flashback. And some dumb robot shit. But there is a lot of fighting!

This one actually opens at a point in the past, a point so far back in the past that it’s colored black and white (It’s after the Wolverine-sexes-up-Magneto’s-girl flashback though, and that was in color, so who knows).

“Eight hundred miles off the coast of Australia. Years ago,” the gray caption box says, above a panel of a plane. Young, bald Charles Xavier is in the pilot’s chair, talking about this young mutant Aborigine he’s found to his pissed-off looking friend Eric, whose all “Who gives a shit about your dumb shit Xavier, all I care about is that my children find a home.”

His children are, of course, Pietro and Wanda, who are very little here. Wanda’s scared of flying, and just as Pietro’s promising that nothing will ever happen to her as long as he’s with her, the wing BOOMs off, and the plane crashes.

Assuming the plane was made out of metal, why didn’t Magneto just float it down safely? I don’t know. He does use his mastery of magnetism to dramatically clear some wreckage out of the way as they walk away from the crash.

Oh, and as the plane is going down, look who spots it:
Lil’ Ka-zar, Lil’ Shanna the Lil’ She-Devil, and darling little Lil’ Zabu.

Why he’s just a cub!

Hey, is Ka-Zar quoting Star Wars, or is that just a coincidence? Normally, I’d guess a coincidence, but given the dumb movie quote Jeph Loeb’s got coming up this issue, I can’t be sure.

When a big, tough guy dressed in animal skins and carrying a huge spear asks if Magneto and pals are okay and who are they anyway, Magneto makes the most evil expression he can and says “We come in peace…”

This is a story that Ka-Zar and Shanna, who are now grown-ups and in color, were telling the Ultimates. They plan to join them in their plans of kicking Magneto’s ass since, over the years, Magneto and his fellow evil mutants have slaughtered over half of K.Z.’s tribe, including his parents.

“Kazar. There’s more than just you and Shanna, right?” Valkyrie asks. “I mean, we need help, bit time.”

“Big time, Valkyrie says, and we see another dude with a torch, and a bunch of silhouettes in the background, indicating a crowd of guys with spears.

Back at the mansion, Iron Man, or the robot posing as him, holds Wasp by the throat and is talking about how the new world order will be better than the old world order, and, well, this:

Ugh. Did Jeph Loeb actually have a character un-ironically quote Terminator? In a story that’s about an evil robot?
Yes, yes he did.

Jesus.

And what’s worse, just as “Captain America” is leading Wasp away from the scene, lightning starts shooting out of his eyes and mouth, he shouts “SKEEEETTT” and Hank Pym, dressed in his Ant-Man costume and riding on a big, fat flying ant, flies out of “Cap”’s open mouth.

The character we thought was Captain America for three panels was actually a robot disguised as a human. Jeph Loeb had a robot-disguised-as-a-human un-ironically quote Terminator.

He melts into a puddle of green, viscous liquid because whatever.

“I need you to shrink down to wasp size and come with me,” Hank says to Wasp. “There’s a conspiracy -- it’s everywhere…”

Back in the Savage Land, Hawkeye is picking off Multiple Man’s multiple men, when Sabretooth jumps at him and shouts “I’m gonna rip your head clean off!”

It’s no “It’s clobberin’ time!” but then, Sabretooth is no Ben Grimm.

That’s when another genuinely cool, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-I-actually-thought-this-was-neat moment occurs—Ka-Zar’s sabretoothed tigers leap on Sabretooth and bury their claws and fangs into him. Sabretooth! Killed by sabretooths! That’s ironic!

(Well, I guess he actually survives, as Hawkeye "finishes him off" next issue, and I saw him ripping off Angel’s wings or something gross in last week’s Ultimatum #4, but as far as Ultimates 3 goes, this is pretty much the last we see of Sabretooth).

The only way this scene would have been cooler? If it was only one tiger—come on Zabu, you could have taken that punk solo—and if instead of Hawkeye getting saved, it was Captain America. And he replied, “You suck on that.”

Okay, maybe not cooler. But funnier!

(By the way, I should point out that as poor a comic book artist as Joe Madureira is, he’s much better suited to Loeb’s cartoonish ultraviolence than David Finch, the guy who’s drawing Ultimatum. This is probably because Madureira is a more cartoonish artists, and doesn’t do that ugly, little line-filled “realistic” style that Finch does. I mean, here we have two-thirds of a page devoted to two big tigers plunging claws and fants into a dude, and there’s not a speck of blood, no limbs flying off or exposed bones are intestines or anything. It’s extreme violence, but it’s relatively tasteful; Madureira apparently draws the split-second where the teeth and claws go in, rather than the split-second where the gushers of blood and shower of torn flesh would come out and off).

Meanwhile, stealthy, tracking-types with heightened senses Wolverine and “The Black Panther” are running through the Savage Land, when Ultimate Juggernaut, now the size of a small house, with hands a few feet wide, sneaks up on them and punches the shit out of them.

“@#$%!” Wolverine says, “The @#$%ing Juggernaut!?”

Ha ha ha ha ha! Like in that one Internet comedy video from many years ago!

The Juggernaut raises his fists to smash Black Panther and, is this the end of the mysterious Black Panther whose identity we don’t know but whose costume has been torn to reveal white skin beneath. White? Oh my God, what is his secret?!

We’ll have to wait until next issue to find out!

Elsewhere, Valkyrie is flying around on her pegasus, when a spurt of flame makes him say “REEEEEE” and throws her off. She wakes up in a messy bedroom, wearing her old “costume,” which was just a half-dozen pie tins, while an unseen landlord knocks on the door and asks for the rent.

She’s experiencing her “own private hell,” the mind-controlling Mastermind says. Late rent? A messy bedroom? Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And since this comics series just hasn’t been gross enough so far, we get this delightful scene:
Meanwhile Thor, Shanna and a bunch of random guys with spears are fighting an army of Multiple Man. Why did the rest of the Ultimates split-up Scooby-Doo style? I don’t know.

This brings us to the scene that Unus the Untouchable fans have been waiting for! Ultimate Unus the Untouchable vs. Ultimate Thor!

Sadly, he never refers to himself as “Unus the Untouchable.” He just stands in front of a rock wall and says, “This place is untouchable” while Thor’s hammer hits a force field in front of him.

“You stand against a god, Unus,” Thor says, and then he raises his hammer and, in the next panel, we get a close-up look at his face, which is contorted into the very angry Madureira expression, blood splatters all over him from off-panel and he says in a special yellow-colored dialogue bubble that Unus is but a mortal, “a thing of mere flesh and blood!”

The implication is that Thor totally smashed Unus the Untouchable with his hammer, but in the very next panel, Thor and his hammer are completely blood-free, and there’s no dead body anywhere. (Or maybe that’s Unus in the far right of the panel? There are some dark, grey shapes being flung around, and I assume they’re Multiple Man duplicates, but its unclear).

Anyway, Magneto strolls up and he and Thor exchange generic dialogue, while Magneto uses his power to drag Mjolnir down through the ground, with Thor still hanging on to it, being towed along with it.

Back in New York, in a subbasement ten stories below the mansion, Ant-Man and Wasp watch through a ventilation grate, as an unseen person puts the Iron Man robot back together, and talks about how the robots are so closely patterned after the Ultimates that their personalities assert themselves strongly (that’s why the Captain America robot tried to save Wasp from the Iron Man robot).

Then we get the dramatic last page splash!

“Hank!” Wasp says “He sounds just like you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Ant-Man replies, “He’s our son…!”

And on the last page, we see that the figure is Yellowjacket! Wearing a costume almost identical to the one that Marvel Universe Hank Pym wore when he was going by the name Yellowjacket, only with smaller shoulder pad wings and without the yellow bug symbol on the chest.

This Yellowjacket is surrounded by four others, the Iron Man, an Ultimate Thor that actually looks like Brian Hitch’s Ultimate Thor (Shorter hair and beard, slimmer build, the big half-axe Mjolnir), an Ultimate Hulk, and an Ultimate Captain America who’s wearing the uniform from World War II.

Here’s the dramatic monologue: “They think of us as toasters -- --alarm clocks -- --and vibrators. But when the war between man and mutant is settled-- --and most of the human population is dead, only then will they realize-- --the MACHINES have already won.”

Holy shit, a machine whose all “Rah rah robots rule!” that Hank Pym says is his son! Who is this mysterious new villain?! If you’ve ever read an Avengers comic, you probably already know. If not, you’ll have to wait until the next issue to find out.

********************

Tomorrow night: This is it! The ultimate issue of Ultimates 3! Who will live? Who will die? Who will utter the worst dialogue? Can a human being write over 10,000 words about Ultimates 3 in just five days and still retain their sanity?! Find out tomorrow night!

Sometimes I really don't get DC Comics.

Today on the company's Source blog they announced a new Red Tornado miniseries, written by Kevin VanHook (most recently of Oracle: The Cure and Superman and Batman Vs. Vampires and Werewolves) and drawn by Jose Luis (whose work I'm unfamiliar with). Red Tornado is, of course, the android hero that nobody in the whole world really likes at all, a character who played a prominent role in Brad Meltzer's relaunched Justice League of America, which has shed a huge chunk of its readers since Meltzer left. The last member of that cast to get a solo miniseries years after the relaunch was Vixen, and that sold extremely poorly (Unlike Red Tornado, Vixen was still on the team at the time too; he's apparently back to being a former member). Black Lightning: Year One sold awful as well, although perhaps that's not apples-to-apples, as his story was set in the past. But using those as examples, DC can't reasonably expect this sell 35,000 copies per issue. They're probably looking at the 19,000-34,000 range. Is that enough to justify a miniseries?

I mean, I guess it must be, or they wouldn't be bothering, but this just seems like such a weird move give the fact that just this week they launched their new "co-feature" program of back-ups. Why not run this as a back-up in JLoA? Sure, it will drive some readers away from that title, but at this point, the only people still reading JLoA—which is about to enter a holding pattern, time-killing run by Len Wein until an inevitable post-Blackest Night reboot—are going to be hardcore, completeist fans anyway.

Anyway, what will the book be about? The Source blog says it "will shed new light on the true origins of the stalwart JLA member/android." Everything you know about the Red Tornado—which is either nothing, or so much confused gibberish it amounts to nothing—is wrong! Seriously, have you ever tried untangling this guy's origin(s) story? At this point, I think I've read them all, but he was one of the many who got screwed in the back-story department during the Crisis on Infinite Earths multiverse collapse, and thus its been revised and re-revised and re-re-revised an oh God, I'm having flashbacks—robot that wants to be human, Tornado Tyrant, Tornado Champion, air elemental, argh!

Anyway, there will be a Red Tornado miniseries for some reason. I hope there's much less crying and sophomoric metaphors than there was in Meltzer's JLoA. I haven't read any of VanHook's books yet—still waiting for the library to get that S&BvV&W's trade—but it can't be any worse than Meltzer's take on the character.

Weekly Haul: June 10th

Billy Batson and The Magic of Shazam #5 (DC Comics) This is the first issue of the series by someone other than Mike Kunkel, whose first four issues were pretty great stuff, but weren’t coming out anywhere near a monthly schedule.

To keep the title appearing more regularly, DC is bringing other folks in to produce issues between the Kunkel-produced one, including writers Art Baltazar and Franco, and different artists. The art team for this particular issue is Byron Vaughns and Ken Branch, and they’re not quite up to the task.

Vaughns does a decent job of capturing Kunkel’s character designs, which were Kunkelized versions of Jeff Smith’s redesigns of the original characters, but there’s no disguising the fact that this is someone aping Kunkle’s art. Does it matter? Probably not to the target audience, which I assume doesn’t consist of 32-year-old Captain Marvel fans who spend a majority of their waking hours thinking about comics.

In addition to the second-generation reproduction quality of the art, the style of the presentation is quite different, as Kunkel often abandoned panels in favor of implied ones between sequential images. This is much more of a traditional comic.

On the other hand, it’s is a comic and it is out, and I’m not going to complain about a comic featuring Captain Marvel fighting Mister Atom being on the stands.

Baltazar and Franco’s script is likewise adequate if not brilliant; they’re definitely following Smith and Kunkel’s versions of the characters, and this issue is full of little call-backs to previous issues.

I liked it okay, but I’d be hesitant to recommend it too enthusiastically.


Booster Gold #21 (DC) I think this is probably the most interesting book released by any publisher this week, at least form an industry-watcher’s perspective, as it’s DC’s first at a $3.99 price point that compensate for the extra dollar with an extra 10-pages of story, devoted to a back-up strip. Well, I call it a back-up; Dan DiDio announced the strategy by calling them “co-features,” while the cover says “second feature.”

I think this is a pretty great idea. I won’t buy a 22-page comic book for $3.99, but a 30-page one? That’s a fair price. More than fair actually, as $2.99 for 22-pages means every seven pages of a comic costs $1. Here we’re getting 7.5 pages per $1. Value!

It also seems a nice solution to the how-to-publish things that aren’t Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Justice or “crisis” titles. Blue Beetle , for example, was DC’s only Hispanic hero with his own title, and his trades did pretty well in libraries. But the monthly was unsustainable as monthly. Publishing it as a back-up allows the company to keep producing material to put in a trade, without the expense of publishing a monthly with sales too poor to justify it’s own existence.

Of course, each of DC’s titles that are going to be published in this format are a little different from each other, so one isn’t necessarily a test-case for another. Green Arrow/Black Canary and Teen Titans, for example, are about to become Green Arrow (with a Black Canary back-up) and Teen Titans (with a Ravager back-up). There’s no real new characters being added; some supporting characters are just getting their own features in the back.

Manhunter will be appearing in the back of a new Batman comic, and is likely going to benefit quite a bit by being there, by the simple fact of the matter that it’s awfully hard to publish an ongoing Batman comic that doesn’t maintain sales well-above cancellation level.

This particular title seems the riskiest, as Booster Gold is still being published, but it’s not like it was ever doing gangbusters or anything; in actuality, it needs Blue Beetle almost as much as Blue Beetle needs it.

(I do hope this works out though; it seems like a nice solution to providing diverse content for both the direct market and the eventual trade paperback market without quite as much risk. For example, Vixen and Black Ligthning sold like hell, and DC might reasonably pass on giving either another miniseries any time in the near future, but what if they were appearing in the back of Wonder Woman and Justice League?)

So how was this? Not bad at all. I dropped both of these titles, but returned to Booster Gold with this issue in part to check out the co-feature program, and in-part because Batman’s on the cover. And not just any Batman, but the new Batman. Exciting!

Now that Batman’s dead, Rip Hunter sends Booster Gold to the Bat-cave to recover evidence Batman had of his time-protecting duties before someone else can see it, but he’s accosted by the new Batman before he can get it. Then the villainous Black Beetle attacks, eventually killing Dick Grayson as Robin, screwing up the time-stream, and giving Booster a new case.

This seems in better keeping with the original conception of the current volume of Booster Gold, as the defender of DC continuity, a concept I found infinitely more interesting than the personal conflicts Booster Gold creator and writer/lay-out artist Dan Jurgens has been dabbling with.

Sure, the dialogue is occasionally pretty corny, and Jurgens’ writing at times reads quite…old-fashioned, but it’s competent enough that I’m not likely to runaway screaming from it.

The pages also seem remarkably full; there are a couple with nine-panel grids even.

Now, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold go together like peanut butter and jelly to comics readers of a certain age, and if these two versions of the characters aren’t quite as tight, the features do share a similar light-hearted tone.

I dropped Blue Beetle before writer Matt Sturges even took over, but this ten-page story by the cancelled ongoing’s last writer worked pretty well (and artist Mike Norton’s art worked even better than okay).

It gets off to a somewhat rocky start, with Jaime Reyes narrating about his problems, having an un-funny funny conversation, and then fighting a giant robot, but by page six, it kicks into high gear, with a “Three hours later…” caption in the middle of a giant robot fight.

How often do you see a superhero fighting a giant robot take so long that the comic has to skip over hours of it? It picks up from there, and by the time I was done reading it, I was glad I did.

It’s the first part of a three-part story, and the Booster Gold story was the first of a four-part one which will apparently deal with Batman and Robin, which ought to give the title a bit of a boost. I know I’m sticking around for at least the story arc, and I guess we’ll see how it goes from there. Good luck DC Comics’ 30-page, $3.99, co-feature-having books! I’m rooting for you!


The Flash: Rebirth #3 (DC) Props to Geoff Johns for busting out a reference to the Upanishads in a discussion of the nature of the Speed Force, and to artist Ethan Van Sciver (and colorist Brian Miller) for some neat “special effects” scenes; I dug the little tentacles of lightning reaching out from Barry’s body and trying to grasp other speedsters, and the last two panels on page 19 where Barry’s limbs stretch out to ridiculous portions.

As for the rest of the book, it remains decent but trifling. It just doesn’t seem very important, which isn’t something a superhero comic needs to be, except in special cases like this, wherein a long-dead superhero is being resurrected after decades of absence. It’s unimportant, but presented as if it’s supposed to be important, which underscores the unimportance of it. Does that make any sense at all? No? Nevermind then; maybe it’s just my own apathy for Barry Allen.

As I’ve said before though, if we had to have a Barry Allen-comes-back-from-the-dead story, this seems like it may be the best one we could have hoped for. Van Sciver’s detailed art often seems stiff and dense, but every once in a while he’ll pull off a great panel like those on page 19 where I forgive the less lively stuff.


Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers #2 (Marvel) Lockjaw’s pack picks up a new member in the Savage Land, as Ka-Zar’s sabretoothed pal Zabu joins the quest of the Infinity Gems. Then they all go back in time and fight Devil Dinosaur. Artist Ig Guara is really doing a hell of a job on this series, “acting” through the characters can’t be easy when there isn’t even a single human being in the book, but he manages to give the various animals distinct visual personalities and expressions throughout. And he sure draws some nice prehistoric animals.


Marvel Adventures Super Heroes #12 (Marvel) This month’s issue features Captain America starring in two different stories. The first is written by Scott Gray, penciled by Matteo Lolli and inked by Christian Vecchia and man, it took some getting used to.

I know these stories are out-of-continuity, or at least continuity neutral, but this one was about Rick Jones guiding a recently defrosted Captain America through the such modern marvels as the Internet, and I had a hard time wrapping my head around a Cap so new to “the present.” (Although Gray makes a joking references to Brangelina and American Idol, so maybe the present is actually a few years ago?)

Rick takes Steve Rogers to an Internet café, and, while Googling—er, Sparrow Hawk-ing Hydra, the pair find the hydraforamerica.com, and end up getting sucked into it. Together they must fight their way through the Internet, and literal manifestations of slang (the trolls in the message board are actually trolls, the firewall is a wall of fire, et cetera).

Lolli’s artwork is fantastic, and while a lot of gags are real groaners, it’s pleasant enough, and I did find the emoticon-headed denizens of Hydra’s site pretty amusing, particularly during fight scenes.

The back-up, however, was a blast. It’s Roger Langridge and artist Craig Rousseau (whose work has never looked better), and it bears the very promising title of “If This Be P.R.O.D.O.K.!”

Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes and three comically-shaped fellow soldiers are all on leave, taking in Casablanca, when ZZAPP!!, what appears to be a German-speaking prototype version of M.O.D.O.K. attacks. It was apparently built by fifth-columnists, from old Ford parts, and is designated as Partially Robotic Organim Designed Only For Killing.

One of my old roommates was a foreign language major who spoke German, and I used to have him translate Nazi dialogue from comics for me all the time. I no longer live with him, and so I have no idea what this -O.D.O.K. was staying. Way to make me miss an old roommate comics.


Miss America Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 (Marvel) Another Marvel 70th Anniversary Special, another great one-shot. The worst of these I’ve read so far has been pretty damn good, and the best have been pretty great super-comics, and this one is no exception.

The character featured here is Miss America, whom I no nothing about aside from the fact that she didn’t get along well with Tike Alicar in X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl.

Oh, and that she was apparently an early pioneer of the photo cover:
The lead story is written by Jen Van Meter, and is about the title character and her Liberty Legionnaires teammates The Whizzer and Blue Diamond (the former who is also her fiancée) busting up villain Brain Drain’s mind-control operation in the states. They split-up to work different angles, with out gal going undercover to snoop out saboteurs working among the women building a top-secret super warship of some kind (The men, of course, are busy fighting the war).

Van Meter plays it mostly straight, but goes j-u-u-u-st over the top enough here and there to make it funny. For example, Miss America’s foes are Madame Mauzer, Vichy Vixen, Axis Annie, Fraulein Fatale and Penny Panzer, and they exchange dialogue like “We’ll see about that, you Teutonic tramp!” and “God, how I loathe you Americans, with your moxie...”

As with several of the previous specials, this one features some rather incredible art, art that frankly puts most of the rest of Marvel’s line to shame.

This time it’s Andy MacDonald, whose heroine is refreshingly real looking—she looks like a normal, slim girl in a costume, rather than a body-builder or Barbie doll (her super-strength doesn’t come from her developed muscles, after all).

There’s something about his lines that remind me a bit of John McCrea’s Hitman art—the way the characters throw punches, or their pantlegs look—and his Whizzer and Blue Diamond have the casual, comfortable, lived-in look of Farel Dalrymple’s super-characters in Omega the Unknown.

It’s just all around great work, and he’s one more contributor to this series who I can’t wait to see more work from (The coloring, unfortunately, is that same over-colored style as the bulk of Marvel’s line; if they colored this like they colored the Marvel Adventures line, it would be perfect).

The back-ups star The Whizzer, who apparently dated or married Miss America, but not Miss America herself, which seems odd—and too bad. Not that the Whizzer stories aren’t amusing, of course, I just would have preferred to see a Golden Age Miss America story to compare the Van Meter/MacDonald story too.

I didn’t realize that The Whizzer’s helmet was apparently bird-shaped at one point, as the back-up adventures feature little bird wings on the side, and an honest-to-God bird’s head sticking out of the front of it.

Poor Whizzer; he sucks so bad I kinda feel sorry for him.

The best of these back-ups is probably “The Terror of Triple Destruction,” during which he battles three muscular, pointy-eared, all-black shapes who are Nazi saboteurs. There’s one great panel where on says “What’s that whizzing sound?” right before the Whizzer whizzes up to him. Awesome. What else could it be, other than the Whizzer? Isn’t he the most obvious candidate for whizzing sounds?


Super Friends #16 (DC) Well this is certainly weird.

In this issue, which is written by Sholly Fisch, cold-themed villains Mister Freeze, Captain Cold, The Icicle, Killer Frost, Minister Blizzard pool their powers to reshape the world more to their liking.

In 2002, Justice League Adventures #12, which was written by Christopher Sequeira, featured cold-themed villains Mister Freeze, Captain Cold, The Icicle, Killer Frost, Minister Blizzard and others pooling their powers to reshape the world more to their liking.

Maybe all-the-cold-villains-team-up isn’t the most original plot in the world and the fact that two Justice League comics aimed at a kid audience used it in less than a decade is just a coincidence. But it sure looks like the latter plagiarized the former (Although given that DC owns both comics, maybe it was more like intentional recycling?)

Well, I liked that JL Adventures, and this, well, it’s not quite as good, but I picked it up anyway on account of the fact that one of the cold-themed villains in it was The Blue Snowman, a Golden Age Wonder Woman villain I was kind of hoping Gail Simone might revive at some point.

The story is about as stupid as the worst issues of this title tend to be, and Dario Bizuela’s art leaves a lot to be desired—I know the artists on this series are greatly constrained by having to hew reasonably close to the Mattel designs for the toys, which make the heroes look like hideous little trolls, but there are several scenes in this issue where characters just look fat. And man, a fat Flash just doesn’t quite work for me.

Ultimates 3 #3

Previously in Ultimates 3: Hawkeye fought Spider-Man in Central Park for seven pages and then stopped, Hank Pym is unconscious at Ultimates Mansion having consumed an unknown quantity of unknown pills, Quicksilver brought his murdered sister Scarlet Witch’s body back to base, Magneto and his mutant terrorist organization The Brotherhood attacked in order to recover the body of his daughter Scarlet Witch, Sabretooth told Captain America to suck it, Wasp begins to think all of the team’s recent misfortunes might be connected, Quicksilver evacuates the Brotherhood at super-speed and absconds with his sister’s body, and then Wolverine shows up and threatens everybody for no reason. (You can read the 2,000-word version here).

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Welcome to Ultimates 3 #3! This issue has my favorite cover so far: Naked Wolverine having the bottom half of his body chomped by a Tyrannosaur. I wouldn’t mind having a huge version of that in a really nice frame over my mantle. The variant cover is by Frank Cho, and it makes Scarlet Witch’s costume look extremely uncomfortable. My nipples and nether region hurt just looking at it. (What, too much information?)

According to the confounding dateline captions, this issue opens at the Tony Stark’s mansion, which is still located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it takes place “last night.” You’ll recall the second issue ended “two seconds ago.” I think the narrative is actually traveling back n time…? Perhaps that’s why there’s a dinosaur on the cover? I guess we’ll find out soon.

So, the previous issue ended with Wolverine popping his claws with a SNIKT and telling the Ultimates they have a bigger problem. It turns out he was threatening them with violence after all, he was just saying hello.

Here he scowls and raises his claws, summarizing the events of the last two issues.

“And before her body is even cold, The Brotherhood-- led by Magneto himself--conveniently shows up here, hands you your collective asses and makes off with the evidence… And none of you want to ask why?”

Er, I know this is nitpicking, but they all have their own individual asses. A collective ass would surely be singular, right? A bigger concern is that everything that Wolverine described happening, from the shooting through Magneto’s attack, happened in within fifteen minutes. News travels fast I guess; fast enough for Magneto and the Brotherhood to have heard about it and arrived to attack, and for Wolverine to have heard about it and dropped by. Maybe they were all in the neighborhood.

(Is it worth noting that Joe Madureira seems to be drawing Marvel Universe Wolverine, rather than Ultimate Universe Wolverine? The Ultimate version had long, more human hair than the weird mane/hair helmet of the original, and had a stupid little soul patch. Maybe later artists on Ultimate X-Men started drawing Ultimate Wolvie more like Original Recipe Wolvie, but there will be some scenes set around the time of the first few issues of Ultimate X-Men later in which Wolverine is sans soul-patch and looks like the stocky little monster troll of the Marvel Universe, instead of the younger, sexier Ultimate version.)

Wolvie says Pietro/Quicksilver called his father Magneto, but Hawkeye disagrees:
Wow, that’s pretty mean, Wolverine.

How does Hawkeye react to Wolverine flippantly bringing up the murder of his family?

By shooting Wolverine five times in a two-page spread, shouting, “That is, mutie, you wanna go, let’s go!”

Wolverine doesn’t like being called “mutie,” as that is apparently a very bad slur to call a mutant, maybe the mutant equivalent of the K-word for Jewish folks or the N-word for black folks?

His eyes turn red, and he shouts “ ‘MUTIE’!?! Oh, I’m gonna DIG this, Barton,” while cutting off half of Hawkeye’s stupid mask.

He retracts his claws when Hawkeye says “I’m better off dead anyway.”



This brings me to one of the parts of the series I genuinely thought was kind of cool, along with the KARAKKAKATHOOM sound effect for Thor in the first issue, and the fact that artist Madureira actually drew Sabretooth with outsized teeth on the cover of the second issue, thus justifying his name…a little (I never understood why Sabretooth was called Sabretooth, since he just had slightly pointy teeth and fought with his fingernails anyway).
So look, neat swearing!

Yeah, it’s still that childish “I’d like to say ‘fuck,’ but since this comic actually kinda sorta for kids even though we say comics aren’t for kids and its full of incest and violence anyway, we have to use four symbols to stand in for the F, the U, the C and the K, even though anyone who’s ever heard a swear word before can deduce from the context that we mean ‘fuck” stuff, these are at least some creative symbols. Kinda like Bettle Bailey swearing, when Whover Draws That Series Know draws little storm clouds and skulls into Sarge’s swearing. Here, the F-word contains a tornado, a radioactive symbol and a skull and cross bones. That’s kinda neat.

Thor doesn’t think so though. He’s had “ENOUGH!” of this shit, and will brook no further fighting amongst the Ultimates.

Wolverine huffs and puffs a bit more about “Pietro and Wanda Lensherr” (shit, I thought there last name was Maximoff? Maybe it’s different in the Ultimate Universe?). When Wasp is all like, “Er, not that we aren’t glad you’re here to help boost sales, why do you give a shit?”

Wolverine explains that, “We’re not talking about just any girl here. We’re talking about Magneto’s daughter. And she could’ve been mine.”

What’s that? Perhaps a Wolverine-narrated flashback will help explain!

It’s “after the war”—I’m guessing the Gulf War—and he’s wandering through the Balkan Mountains in the harsh winter, looking for Wundagore, which means something if you’re familiar with the Marvel Universe (Has Wundagore appeared in any Ultimate books?). He collapses—healing factor on the fritz?—and is found by Magda, Wanda and Pietro’s mother.

See, Wolverine was looking for the Witch of Wundagore, hoping she could help him end his immortal life. Instead, he finds himself naked in her bed, with her standing naked in front of the fire. And then they totally do it. In silhouette, of course, because remember, this is for teenage boys, because what other audience wants to read about Wolverine fucking Scarlet Witch’s mom, but also can’t be permitted to see actual nudity?

(There’s a close-up scan. I didn’t scan it myself, but just found it when google image-ing to see if I could find a scan of the two-page spreads. It’s from a review of this very issue by James Hunt, which you can find here. It’s well worth a read, as Hunt seems to have noticed a whole bunch of little continuity glitches I didn’t, like the number of Hawkeye’s dead children, and the state of Wolverine’s memory during the flashbacks. The Ultimate Universe was only about seven years old at the point this book was published; there really wasn’t much continuity for Loeb and his four editors to have to get right).

That’s when Eric Lensherr, who would one day be Magneto, walks in and finds his wife/girlfriend/lover/whatever in bed with a naked Wolverine. Magneto powers up and then throws a big cauldron at Wolverine, throwing him naked down the mountain.

“I’d been cast down out of heaven…” he says, “…Only to learn that I could not find Wundagore ever again.”

Flash forward to The Savage Land, when Wolverine was working for Magneto (as seen in the first arc of Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men). Wolvie recognizes Scarlet Witch as Magda’s daughter.

Magneto orders Wolverine to track Wanda and Pietro when they go exploring in the jungle, and kill Pietro.

Pietro clasps his sister’s hand and tells her she looks more like their mother every day (Ew), and Wolverine says he “wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t…interrupted.” (Ew). He sticks his claws in Pietro’s chest (although he narrates that he wasn’t trying to actually kill him, just spook him enough to get him to leave his father), but then TWO-PAGE SPLASH!
Wanda glows pink and the background fills with glowing eyed dinosaurs. Apparently, it was Wanda who filled the Savage Land with dinosaurs, as she was able to bend time in space and rearrange reality; Magneto simply took credit for it. A T-Rex chases Wolverine away.

Once they think they’re alone, well, I guess they start doing it, and Wolverine watches…
So yeah, ew.

Wasp splits up the team, sending half after Magneto in the Savage Land, and keeping the rest with her. Thor, Valkyrie, Wolverine and The Black Panther are the Savage Land team, and when Wasp sees BP, she asks where he’s been and where Captain America is. He doesn’t answer, and Wolverine takes one look at the Panther and asks incredulously if “that’s the Black Panther.” Oh my God, have you figured out his secret yet?

If not, a few pages later, Wolverine let’s the Panther know he knows his identity and he can’t figure out why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Back in New York, Iron Man tells The Wasp he examined the crime scene and discovered that the bullet used to kill Scarlet Witch was a D.N.A.-specific one and was manufactured by Stark Industries. And then he removes his faceplate to reveal…a robot face underneath? And then he hits Wasp with a bolt of electricity!

The Ultimates’ transport lands safely in the Savage Land—hey, I thought people always crash-landed when they visited the Savage Land?—and meet Wolverine’s contacts there, who get introduced in a last-page splash.


There are two admittedly rather cool looking sabretooth tigers, and posed between them are two mostly naked figures.

“I’m Shanna and this is my boyfriend Ka-Zar,” the female says. Sweet, it’s Ultimate Shanna the She-Devil and Ultimate Ka-Zar! And, while it doesn’t say so, I assume the sabretooth he’s leaning on is Ultimate Zabu. How does he differ from "616" Zabu? He's striped. Bad-ass.

And that’s the third issue. We’ve passed the halfway mark!

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Tomorrow night: The Ultimates vs. The Brotherhood! Another genuinely cool scene! An attempted rape scene, demonstrating that this is all very serious and adult! And Ultimate Unus the Untouchable! And don’t forget to come back in a few hours for this week’s Weekly Haul

Ultimates 3 #2

Previously in Ultimates 3: A leaked sex-tape of Tony “Iron Man” Stark and Natasha “The Black Widow” Romanova was leaked to the media and aired un-edited on ABC and CNN, Venom attacked The Ultimates’ mansion headquarters and was ultimately melted by Thor, The Wasp revealed to Captain America that brother and sister Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are indeed fucking, Wasp then discovered that Hank “Giant Man”/“Ant-Man” Pym was either dead or unconscious from having taken a bunch of pills, and someone killed The Scarlet Witch using some sort of special Quicksilver-dodging, Scarlet Witch-seeking mini-missile. (Much more detail here).

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The second issue of Ultimates 3 is much better than the first, which probably isn’t saying too much, considering that it wouldn’t have been possible for it to be any worse. Still, as I sat down to write-up my synopsis of and thoughts on this issue, I realized I had hardly scanned any images from it, so there were relatively few “Oh my God you need to see this to believe it!” type of scenes.

Perhaps that’s because this second issue is pretty much all fighting? And while the dialogue is unbelievably bad and the action uninspired, pointless and occasionally incompetently conveyed, it’s at least better than all the attempts to advance a plot that occurred in the previous issue.

As in the previous issue though, Jeph Loeb displays an disturbing lack of understanding of either the way linear and non-linear narratives work or what it’s like to live in the fourth dimension. Perhaps a combination of the two?

The first panel of the first issue opened with a caption informing us that the very first scene of the comic was occurring “last night,” while the rest of it occurred “today.”

The first panel of this second issue opens with a caption reading “Twenty-two minutes ago.”

So, the first scene of this book occurs “twenty-two minutes ago.” Got that? You probably assume that means that it takes place twenty-two minutes before the last panel, the dramatic full-page splash at the end of the first issue, in which Dr. Blake declares Scarlet Witch dead.

But no, that’s not the case. A few panels later, we see a couple of New York police officers getting a call over their scanner about the shooting, so this is happening around the same time as the previous scene, not actually twenty-two minutes before it.

Later scenes in the book also use weird captions to designate the time as being in the recent past. For example, the next one we see is “seven minutes ago,” and finally “two seconds ago.”

The best I can come up with to explain this is that Loeb saw another comic book where it was used right, thought it was cool without really understanding it, and tried to replicate it here. How would it be used right? Well, I imagine if a comic started in medias res, with some crazy situation, like Superman leading an army of Kryptonian centaurs who are about to execute the members of the Justice League. Then the next page might say “22 minutes ago,” and the rest of the book would slowly unfold how we got from the strange “now” situation.

But Ultimates 3 #2 doesn’t do that. Like the first issue, it is a perfectly linear narrative, with one scene leading chronologically to the next, with noting but the little dateline captions saying otherwise.

The lesson? If you’re reading a Jeph Loeb comic, never read any of the captions. Trust me, they’re much better that way. It’s really the only way to read Superman/Batman, in which the two characters narrate the exact same events in every single panel, deviating only to let the reader know in no uncertain terms that they are actually madly in love with one another but are too afraid to just come out and say it, because what would Lois and/or Robin think?

Okay, so we know the when is “twenty-two minutes ago,” whatever on earth that means. The where is Central Park’s southwest entrance. (Just in case you want to take an Ultimates 3 tour of the city at some point).

There we see Spider-Man, that is, Ultimate Spider-Man swinging around on a web line, narrating out loud to himself like Stan Lee was still writing the poor sap: “Bad enough I went out this morning to school without a jacket… …whe knew I was going to need thermal underwear?”

Indeed. When he over hears the police scanner saying a woman was shot in the vicinity of Radio City Music Hall, he jumps on top of a police car and shouts “Oh, No! Aunt May said she was going to see the Christmas show at Radio City…”

All of a sudden, a BLAM rings out, and Spidey is down, a tranquilizer dart in his shoulder. What could this mean?

It means we need a double-page splash panel, showing Hawkeye jumping at Spider-Man and firing more darts, saying, “You should’ve stayed down, kid!”

Here’s what the spread looks like, without the dialogue and sound effects added:
(You know, if the whole book was free of dialogue, it might have been a much better read. It certainly wouldn't have made any less sense, and every reader could imagine their own dialogue, which would be better than what Loeb came up with.)

Why has Hawkeye ambushed Spidey? As he told Captain America and Wasp last issue, after their chat about the Maximoffs incestuous relationship, that he was going to track down Spider-Man to see what he knew about Venom attacking the mansion.

He is apparently planning to literally shoot first and ask questions later.

Their fight lasts three more pages, with Hawkeye saying things like, “Maybe I have gone a little crazy. Maybe every time I hear a gunshot it takes me right back to when my family…” and Spidey saying thngs like “How’ bout you go cry your eyes out on Oprah…” and “Eat web, cowboy!”

Before long, the dart takes effect, and Spidey is down for the count, with Hawkeye pressing a gun to his head and threatening to kill him if he finds out that Spidey had something to do with Venom attacking. Apparently he’s not going to just shoot first and ask questions later; he’s just going to shoot, and then threaten to shoot.

Suddenl, a shield dramatically KLANKs the gun out of Hawkeye’s hand, and Captain America says the deranged purple enthusiast must return to base with him “A.S.A.P., priority one.”

The pair leave Spidey laying in the snow, still paralyzed from the dart. That is the last we’ll see of or hear from Spider-Man for the rest of the series. The first third of this issue? Completely irrelevant. (Well, it did give Joe Madureira a chance to draw Spider-Man, which I imagine is why it was included at all).

Suddenly, it’s “seven minutes ago.” Seven minutes before the last twenty-two minutes ago? Or 15 minutes later? Damn, I forgot I’m not suppose
d to bother with captions.

Whenever it is, the place is the Ultimates mansion. Hank Pym is alive after all, as he’s lying in a hospital-style bed, a tube in his nostrils, and Wasp at his bedside pleading with him to regain conscious and tell him what pills he took, as “there were dozens.”

That’s when Pietro VOOOOSHes in with Wanda’s body, and starts explaining what happened in super-speed.

I was going to point out how ridiculous it is that Pietro was expecting his radio signals to reach Wasp and for her and/or the Ultimates respond in the space of a few split-seconds, but let’s be generous to Loeb and assume Pietro’s in shock over his sister’s death, and he’s forgetting he’s the only one who has super-speed.
Wait, Wasp is saying she didn’t get any message…? So she’s assuming she should have received it as well…?

Fuck, I can’t make sense of this stuff. Four editors! They could have drawn straws, and who ever had the short one would have to call Loeb and be like, “Hey, this scene on page eight and nine? What the hell’s going on here man?”

Suddenly the power goes out! The door is blown open! And five villains pose in a full-page splash panel, little pink-ish boxes identifying them.

Mystique! Sabretooth! Blob! Madrox! And Lorelei! I remember the first four from various Ultimate X-Men stories (well, I think Mystique was just the name of Professor X’s cat during Mark Millar’s run on the title, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of the later UXM writers introduced her in this form). As for Lorelei, I don’t remember seeing her in an Ultimate Universe story, nor a Marvel Universe story, but her name and power are pretty self-explanatory; she seems to function like The Enchantress, and she fights Thor in a few moments.

Drunken Tony Stark is struggling to put on his armor when Natasha appears in his room, but Wasp “stings” her somewhere inside her head, revealing her to be the shape-changed Mystique.

Thor and Valkyrie had been cuddling in bed, and Thor explained why he started talking like Marvel Universe Thor.

“For the year past I struggled to prove my identity to the people of Midgard,” he says, “Now, I have no such conflict.”

So you see, he was trying to prove he was really Thor by talking like everyone else, and now that everyone knows he’s Thor, he can talk like Thor. Yeah, I don’t understand that explanation either. But who cares, for no sooner does Valkyrie get her Red Sonja-style chain mail bikini top on then Lorelei appears and tells Thor to kill Valkyrie in a special font, his eyes start glowing, and he attacks her.

Blog, meanwhile, attacks the Ultimates’ refrigerator, and when Wasp confronts him, letting us know that she’s struggled with bulimia for years (Hey, a relevant issue! So tastefully addressed!), Blob responds, “Wasp! Gonna eat you up!” Iron Man saves her this time, but Blob apparently gets his wish in Loeb’s series Ultimatum (Click here to see a gross panel of Blob eating Wasp. Or at least part of her).

Elsewhere, Cap is asking Hawkeye to save at least one Multiple Man to interrogate, when Sabretooth attacks Cap from behind, his claws raking against his back and summoning a splash of red blood. In the next panel, we see Capt’s wound-less back…his costume’s not even torn, and he hits Sabretooth with his shield, saying “I want you out of this house, Creed.”

This leads to what may be the most representative panel of the whole series. This, by the way, is a full-page splash:
Oh man. I’m not sure how comics writers get paid these days, but does Jeph Loeb get a page rate? Like, doe she get $30 or $100 bucks or $250 for each page worth of script he writes? Whatever the amount, I kind of hope he does.

Because I really like the idea of him giggling to himself and simply typing the words “Suck it” on a page worth of script and thinking, “There, that’s $50 (or however much) Quesada owes me.”

Or did Loeb and Madureira use the old Marvel method when creating this, wherein Loeb gave Madureira a basic plot outline to break down and drawn, and then he returned to dialogue based on the final art? Like, did Loeb give Madureira a synopsis for this scene saying “Sabretooth and Captain America fight,” and Madureira just decided to draw a huge, one-page image to cut down on the work? And Loeb had no choice but to insert a single line of stupid dialogue.

I want to know how this page came to be. I am honestly fascinated that this was published in a Marvel comic book, that Marvel paid professionals to write, draw, color, letter and edit this page, and then they charged people money to buy a comic book containing it.

That is 1/22nd of this issue. If you bought this comic book, you paid 13 cents for this image.

The fight continues for three more panels, while in the infirmary Quicksilver is ignoring the battle, and staring intently at his sister’s dead body. Is he waiting for his father to show up, as he knows he will, or is he imagining what sexual act could be even more edgy than incest, now that his sister is dead?

No sickos, he was waiting for his father, who he knew was there the minute the lights went out, he says.

Magneto and Quicksilver exchange a few words, and when Magneto asks who his estranged son thinks will have a better chance of solving his sister’s murder, Quicksilver grabs all the Brotherhood villains and disappears—with Magneto and his sister’s body.

As Wasp explains what just happened to Hawkeye and Cap, a dialogue bubble spoken from someone off-panel gets their attention: “I know you think you’ve got a murder to solve, but, believe me—“

And then it’s time for another full-page splash! This one features Wolverine, wearing a belt full of pouches around his right thigh, and dramatically popping his claws, while saying finishing his dramatic entrance line: “--You’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands!”

This image, by the way, is the one that takes place “two seconds ago.”

And thus concludes Ultimates 3 #2.

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Tomorrow: Hey, it’s Wednesday tomorrow, and there will be new comics to read. Will Ultimates 3 week pre-empt the usual Wednesday night Weekly Haul feature? No, no it will not. I should have two posts tomorrow. First, we’ll examine Ultimates 3 #3, the issue containing two gross sex scenes, and then I’ll have the usual reviews of the week’s new books that I’ll read. See you then! Well, I won’t actually see you, I guess…unless you have live webcams and stream yourself reading my blog…but you know what I mean.