One of the things that often presented a challenge to our “review a day” format at Comics Daily was the sheer inconsistency of comics shipping – the fact that, although there should really ostensibly be a fairly even spread of comics worth reviewing (whether a book we’re buying anyway, or one we wouldn’t if we weren’t reviewing but considered worth trying to say something about) over the four (or sometimes five) shipping weeks of each month. But that often wouldn’t tend to be the case, and we were frequently left scrabbling over B- or C-list main superhero universe titles that – and no disrespect to the creators involved – aren’t always the easiest thing to find an angle on if you’re not a fan.

Conversely, we’d often find ourselves with a week where there were lots of books we fancied covering, but simply didn’t have the time between us. Often, a lot of my favourite books – from Phonogram to Batman and Robin, Captain Britain to Ultimate Spider-Man – end up coming out in the same week, which makes for a fun visit to Forbidden Planet, but a difficult quandary when working out what to write about. Our “Sunday Pages” capsule review posts would help with this, obviously – and both James and I have also tended to find of late that these shorter reviews are quite enjoyable to put together. With that scheduled series of posts temporarily on hold, however (I, or we, may revisit it at some point – but for the moment one of the things we’re exploring with the new format is not having a specific schedule to stick to beyond “something every day”), there won’t be a regular set of capsules each week, but every so often a week may come along in which I feel the urge to ramble on about a handful of books. This is just such a week, so read on for brief reviews of Powers, Ex Machina, S.W.O.R.D. and more…

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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.

You’ve read us yakking about Alias enough on here by now, I’m sure. But a comic that you might be less aware of, one that got even less of a chance to fully establish itself, was Bendis’ follow-up series, The Pulse. After inadvertently bringing Alias to a natural end point, he shuffled Jessica Jones and Luke Cage over to a new series and setup, where Jessica would work alongside Ben Urich and Kat Farrell at the Daily Bugle. It was a nice idea – not least because it involved putting Jessica and Urich, two of Marvel’s best characters, in the same comic – but managed to find itself caught up in crossovers and tie-ins (not to mention stuck with a rotating cast of artists – all strong in ability, but it led to an unconsistent “feel”) for almost the entirety of its run. Only with its last arc, Fear – which culminated in this, the penultimate issue of the series before the lead couple would move over again to New Avengers – did it really manage to do the kind of story you suspect it was always designed to.

By this point, however, Jessica had already angrily quit the Bugle, meaning that the series’ setup lasted for an even shorter time than its publication. As such, although there’s a linking thread involving the paper trying to cover Jessica and Luke’s baby’s birth, the issue’s pretty much split down the middle between the “main” plot – that of said birth – and one involving Urich. The Jessica scenes – wrapping up a story that is essentially a little coda to Alias itself – are good, particularly a nice moment where Ms. Marvel is made to recount the circumstances of her own… offspring (a neat bit of meta-commentary by Bendis on a controversial and best-forgotten moment in Carol’s history), but if truth be told, it’s not the primary plotline that makes this such an unmissable issue. Rather, it’s the subplot, involving Ben Urich tracking down a rather pathetic, fallen C-list hero called D-Man, and learning just how far it’s possible for the heroes that the MU’s citizens take for granted to fall.

I didn’t know the character before this arc – his schtick is that he’s a former wrestler and massive Daredevil fan, who dresses in a replica of DD’s old yellow costume and a Wolverine mask – but his story as portrayed in this issue is devastatingly touching. Ravaged by a mental illness that leads him to believe he’s on a “quest” to retrieve seven “Infinity Gems” (actually trinkets almost unwittingly stolen from jewellery stores), he’s living in a sewer off scraps of food. His earnestness in the face of his horrendous situation is deeply poignant – and rendered quite superbly in the facial expressions drawn by the welcome-returning Michael Gaydos, who’s possibly never been better than in these scenes – and Bendis’ mastery is in having this poor, wretched soul be discovered by Ben Urich. Not only does this allow for a splendid piece of pontificating narration from the journalist, but it makes for a warm – yet still quite sad – conclusion as he gets his friend Matt Murdock to intervene. Maybe this wouldn’t get everyone the way it seems to strike at me – I suppose different “issues” are meaningful to different people – but by gum it’s difficult reading, yet at the same time a rare and welcome musing on a topic rarely explored in this medium.

There are many who write off Bendis purely on the strength of reading the type of comic he’s generally weakest at (i.e. Marvel’s big summer crossovers, or his first attempt at “doing” the Avengers). But it’s hard to deny, when he writes a story as moving, powerful and rooted in humanity as this, that he’s capable of standing up there with the best of this generation of creators. It’s partly the fact that he does something that so few other writers would have thought to do, as much as it is the compassionate and innately empathetic execution. It’s a shame that The Pulse was so short-lived, considering the story potential it held, but I’m thankful that we at least got another quick shot of that Bendis/Gaydos magic.

As someone who reads Ultimate Spider-Man in trade format, I was not looking forward to revisiting Ultimatum, to the point where I almost skipped this trade entirely. Completism prevailed, though, and after reading it, I can at least say this with certainty: it did the best with the material it was given.

The trade, however, kicks off with Ultimate Spider-Man Annual #3, which was once promoted as Bendis’ attempt to deal with the question of whether Ultimate Peter and Ultimate Mary Jane have had Ultimate Sex yet. In practise, the topic isn’t massively centre-stage, but it is dealt with and it’s the sort of material that is relevant to a teenage super-hero book in particular, so an acknowledgement isn’t a bad thing at all. The rest of the annual, while capably drawn by David LaFuente, turns out to be a bit weak, debuting Ultimate Mysterio, but going no further than that.

Afterwards, it’s all Ultimatum territory, reprinting Ultimate Spider-Man #129-#133 – though, annoyingly, not the two issue Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem which served as a coda to the main series, even though Bendis went out of his way to emphasise that the requiem issues were important at the time. Somewhere, there’s a marketing manager or editorial member who needs a good slap for that one, because if you want the final two Ultimate Spider-Man issues, you have to buy the Requiem trade and get Fantastic Four and X-Men stories too. No thanks.

The stories that ARE included, though, are fair-to-middling. The street-level portrayal of the cast’s life, and how horrifyingly it gets turned upside down by the events of Ultimatum give the whole crossover some much needed human faces, although Bendis unwisely tries to tell more regular stories in the framework too – a subplot about Gwen’s return to school after her resurrection exposing Aunt May to the authorities as a “person of interest” regarding Spider-Man starts off with serious momentum, then (understandably) disappears entirely once the disaster hits – but what about after?

Later, there are a few nice moments of comedy – Peter trying to herd the Hulk around, for example, and Johnny Storm inadvertantly hitting on Peter’s clone – but largely, the story is all over the place and doesn’t make a lot of sense without Ultimatum – which, given that Ultimatum is not called “Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 21-and-a-half” is pretty frustrating. The writing is good, the art is good, but because of the crossover, there’s no story to tell, only the chance to depict Spider-Man’s supporting cast running around in headless chicken mode – and that, in itself, isn’t very entertaining.

There’s an odd sense of finality to the trade – without the Requiem issues tagged on the end, this “last” volume of Ultimate Spider-Man concludes with the hero’s apparent death, and a several-page retrospective interview with Bendis about the endeavour of reinventing him. Combined with the renumbering, one could easily believe that this was genuinely the end. Of course, we know Ultimate Comics Spider-Man will continue the story, but as it turns out, my first instincts seem correct – you probably can skip this trade entirely.

For the first couple of pages – a double-page spread, in fact – USM #6 looks like being a bit of a format-breaker. And of a sort of which Bendis has been shown to be fond in the past – clearly bored of squeezing all of his dialogue into those tiny little balloons while the pretty pictures take up most of the page space, in almost every series he’s written (certainly in Powers, Alias and the previous incarnation of Ultimate Spidey to name just three) there’s been an occasion where he goes “To hell with this” and decides instead to put out an illustrated monologue, or a script, or some other way of combining prose with pictures without it actually being done like a comic.

But after an opening which is essentially an odd little straight-to-camera monologue from Peter – wondering, with a bafflement that the reader can only share, just how his house came to be full of quite so many characters while also providing an interesting nugget of context for the whole Gwen relationship thing – it settles down, slightly disappointingly, to become a fairly straightforward issue. Not that that’s a problem for this book – sharp dialogue, high-school-based character stuff (and a nice scene with Aunt May and the Principal that re-emphasises the curious “everyone loves Spidey” status quo we still find ourselves in), and big ’splodey action bits kicking in halfway through when a Mysterio-powered Spider Slayer type thing blows its way into Midtown High. I’ve written before how pleasing this actually-competent version of the villain is, and it continues here – and Lafuente excels with a slightly creepy design for the robot, making good use of the “eyes” motif. Meanwhile, the vague mystery over the identity of the unnammed hooded vigilante type person is finally given an answer, for the two or three people who didn’t figure it out. What’s interesting, though, is that six issues on there’s been no real discernable individual “arc” – instead, everything just feels a little bit more “ongoing”, with Mysterio lurking in the background throughout rather than just being able to call these issues “the Mysterio arc”.

There are still a few reservations about the direction this is all taking – it does feel a little bit like it’s juggling too many characters, with an essentially separate (for the moment) plot surrounding Kitty to add to the various things going on in Peter’s own life. In much the same way as Aunt May has taken in all of these assorted waifs and strays, it’s as if Ultimate Spider-Man has become the only refuge for all the younger characters that this universe was supposed to be about (nobody anywhere else is bothering to tell the story of just what’s actually happening with the Fantastic Four now, for example) – but there are limits, and you wonder just what a character like Bobby Drake is going to add to proceedings, especially when it means long-established characters like Kong, Flash and Liz are getting pushed into the background instead. But for all that, Bendis is still generally getting the mixture of action, humour and teen-drama spot on – and in a week when Spidey movie talk is all the rage, it’s hard to see a better audition piece to write a new one (especially one set back in the high school days) than he’s continuing to turn in. Sony, you know it makes sense.

At this point, there should be no doubt that Brian Bendis knows how to handle himself with the opening issues of “event” books. From House of M, through last summer’s Secret Invasion, Bendis has shown he knows how to get the ball rolling. The problem is what happens afterwards – traditionally 5 or 6 issues of people talking and prepating and arriving for fights before anything actually happens. Hopefully, with Siege squashed into a mere 4 issues, Bendis will be forced to curtail his decompression a little.

Still, that leaves us with this to consider. Siege #1. The first issue of a plot that, by this point, we’re all plenty familiar with. Osborn and Loki conspire to get the latter in control of Asgard, bringing about the re-assemblage of The Real Avengers and the downfall of Normal Osborn. If anything, it feels almost TOO famliar.

The familiarity isn’t helped by the events of the issue. Bendis openly riffs on the flashpoint of Civil War, as Osborn and Loki con Volstagg into a public confrontation – but acknowledging in-story that you’re copying previous events doesn’t prevent the sense of deja vu from permeating the story. More so the final page – merely the latest instalment in a series of final pages featuring a “shock” splash of Steve Rogers that have been turning up since, ooh, last November?

In short – there are no surprises in this issue. But happily, that’s the only really big criticism that can be levelled against it. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the onslaught of promotional material, the issue establishes its story rather definitively, with no additional reading required. The banter between Osborn and his Dark Avengers is Bendis’ at his naturalistic best (although the transcript bonus material – misprint aside – is less so). Ares, in particular, gets some decent moments, with Bendis’ enthusiasm reminding us that it was he who brought the character into the Avengers’ fold in the first place.

Although it’s an enjoyable read some smaller concerns do creep in around the edges – is Volstagg really that easily tricked? and what the hell is Maria Hill wearing? But in general, Siege #1 is confident and assured, and ultimately only a little bit uninteresting for it.