Ultimate Comics Enemy #1
This review written by James Hunt on Jan.29, 2010.
Oh dear. Ever since the “Ultimate” comics staged a Reggie Perrin-style fall and rise, things have been going fairly well. Ultimate Comics Spider-Man is a revitalised version of its predecessor. Ultimate Comics Avengers has brought back the crystal clarity and panache (if not the sheer inventiveness) of Ultimates to the line. After the widely-panned Ultimatum, any forward momentum is an improvement, so these days, it takes a lot for an Ultimate series to look bad.
But then you have Ultimate Comics Enemy. After one issue, the disappointing truth seems clear – it’s a Bendis Crossover-by-numbers. In this issue, an amorphous threat (quite literally speaking) upsets various characters’ status quo. We get disconnected snippets of characters, until 22 pages in, we’re left blinking and dumbstruck, but with absolutely no story to hang onto besides “what just happened?” – and these days, when you’re paying $3.99 per instalment, that’s not enough.
It’s also a shame, given Rafa Sandoval’s excellent depiction of a city being subsumed by a giant pink blob, that in a post-Ultimatum universe, threats of this magnitude just don’t seem credible. Last time something on this apparent scale happened, we had a year’s worth of promotion and hype. Arguably, now is not the time to rush into a giant, overwhelming threat that can’t be punched into submission, because it can’t possibly follow through like Ultimatum did – but that’s what we appear to be getting. The best scenes in this issue are actually the small, character moments that allow us to explore the new “disbanded” status of the Fantastic Four – but set against such a massive threat, such material pales into insignificance.
However, the truly sad part is that no matter what we’ve been told about “Ultimate Comics” being the new future face of Marvel, it’s all so painfully rooted in the past. This entire issue is plagued by exactly the kind of decompression that Bendis was pioneering in the first half of last decade. Where it once looked nuanced and inventive, it now looks flabby and unadventurous. I don’t like to spend too much time criticising an individual’s signature technique, but three pages for Nick Fury to get attacked while eating dinner feels like a poor use of space. An entire issue in, I feel like I’ve just seen the pre-credits sequence to a TV show. The only difference is that on TV, I only have to wait seconds for the story to continue, whereas there’s nothing here that’s going to bring me back in a month’s time.
January 30th, 2010 on 1:48 pm
I didn’t even bother flicking through this on the shelf. I’ve given up on Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Armour Wars already. I think I’m officially done. Oh well.
February 1st, 2010 on 6:31 pm
I’ve also grown tired of Bendis’s style in recent years, but I quite liked this issue. Like you say, when he focuses on the character moments, he really nails it. The scene between Ben and Sue is still something quite rare and precious in comics. Also, I thought Nick Fury was quite funny…
February 2nd, 2010 on 4:56 pm
The idea of Nick Fury being interrupted at dinner was funny, it was just the execution that grated one me. There’s a joke there worth telling, but it isn’t three pages’ worth of joke by any stretch. There was nothing in that scene comparable to, for example, the Ben and Sue material, and because the plot was pretty much just “everyone gets attacked” it meant that the issue felt like it ended without resolution.
February 5th, 2010 on 1:35 am
Truthfully I rather liked this issue despite more or less agreeing with your complaints (with some to add). The one thing that stuck at me more than anything else was the Ben/Sue moment. I saw that development coming the moment I knew Reed was nowhere near them. It just seemed like one of those moments that exist SOLELY because it doesn’t take place in the ‘core Marvel Universe’ rather than exist on its own terms. But then again, I haven’t read anything Ultimate FF related in quite a few years so maybe I missed a subplot or two.