1012

Too much death, cheesecake and neurotic "good guys". A fine example of why I'm not as much of a comics fan as I used to be.
--J. ( )

** there are mild spoilers in this review **

Apparently Jeph Loeb used to be a decent, if not awesome, comic book writer. I would not know, since this is the first thing that I've ever read that he has written. If this is the case, he definitely forgot to pack the awesome into this story.

Oh, I heard that this was awful, but I didn't quite believe it. I loved Millar's Ultimates 1 & 2, and I figured that this couldn't be as bad as everyone said it was. Wrong. It was.

Most of the Ultimates have had major personality shifts in this book, and it's not for the better. Okay, maybe I can believe Hawkeye turning into a suicidal, hair-trigger person. He did see his entire family slaughtered, after all. I can't see Tony turning into a raging alcoholic over Natasha's death, though. Yeah, he was torn up over her betrayal, and yeah he was already more than halfway to being a raging alcoholic, but he seemed to take her death in stride pretty quickly and was chatting up the ladies in no time (literally). And I never did understand why Thor was talking strangely; even the other characters in the book didn't seem to know why and asked him about it. Captain America, in spite using curse words himself in the previous volumes, now is offended when others do the same. Captain America as Black Panther made no sense; not only was it totally obvious who Black Panther was, but it was never explained.

Speaking of "totally obvious," I have to talk about Pietro and Wanda's relationship, which I think was the biggest flashpoint that I've heard discussed in comics circles. Millar definitely flirted with the idea that Pietro and Wanda had an incestuous relationship, but it was much more subtle. Some people thought they were in a relationship together, some people thought that Pietro was gay, and others thought that they were simply strange. Loeb made it clear that they were sleeping together, and he hammered the point home several times. And only Hawkeye seemed to think this was sick. Jan even told Captain America, in so many words, to stop being such a square when it comes to incest.

I didn't get Loeb's explanation of why Magneto was so hard on Pietro in particular. Yeah, Pietro looks like his father's mirror image, and Wanda looks like her mother's mirror image. But the mother cheated on Magneto with Wolverine (why?), so I'd think that Magneto would be harder on Wanda, because she was unfaithful to him.

I really wonder if Loeb bothered to read Millar's Ultimates (and Ultimate X-Men) before giving this a go. Not only did he mess around with the characters' personalities, but he changed the timeline Millar set up. Wanda and Pietro, for example, had apparently had a "thing" for one another for years in this volume, but that isn't the case in Millar's Ultimates (it seems more recent). The twins' mother was named Isabelle and was human in the previous Millar-written works; now she's named Magda and is a witch. The twins were in California "six years ago" (they went to the Savage Land after that), which meant they had to be at least about twelve at the time, according to Millar. In Loeb's Ultimates, the twins are children (probably about six) when they go to the Savage Land. Stuff like this really bothered me, and those are only a few examples. ( )