“Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #6”, by Marc Alan Fishman – Snarky Synopsis

ce, and proceeds to decimate most of Europe. Why? Because he’s a little evil. I think. He’s certainly drawn that way. At the beginning of this, the 5th volume of The Ultimates, Nick Fury and his super-powered cohorts get their keesters kicked by Reed’s super troopers of the evolved super-city. Over the next few issues, wave after wave of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, super heros, and robots blow up. In the end, Reed says “I can kill you anytime I want. So leave me alone.” And the Ultimates do. I guess.

The trick to all of this, lay in Hickman’s obviously clever pen. It’s no secret the boy can write. I love his more direct approach in FF / Fantastic Four. In the Ultimate U, he let’s his inner psuedo-scientist take reign over the scripting. What results are scenes written with an odd mashup of clichéd-realist-depressing dialogue and overly-profound brainspeak. Scene after scene, characters gnash their teeth, and shoot one another, but to no avail. The people in Reed’s super city, are so advanced, the fact that they can get hurt seems to be derived solely by the plot’s need to make us think there was ever a chance the “good guys” could win. Two pages later (and this theme repeats no less than twice by this 6th issue….) we’re told how futile all this fighting is. The remainder of the issues are stock full of serious talking head scenes, where exposition is doled out in droves, but I frankly don’t understand where it’s all headed just yet.

In issue #6, we begin with Nick Fury visiting Steve Rogers, who for reasons I don’t care to look up… isn’t on the team. He apparently lives out in the desert like a cowboy. Hickman’s dialogue for the scene is brilliant (honestly!). Fury asks if Steve will re-up. Steve offers up his advice. “Drop the Hulk on them.” He knows he’s no brilliant general. He’s just a super soldier. And a patriotic one at that. Fury, deflated and defeated tries to hint at the possibility of ole’ Cap waving the white flag for all to see. This would tell the American President to stand down against Reed and his Civilization 2.0. But that’s against “the American Way”… Rogers pouts, and Fury is sent packing. The scene is completely indicative of my feeling for the series on a whole. It’s written well, but it’s seemingly useless. If Hickman’s goal is to create the sense of uselessness, he’s nailing it in spades. The rest of the issue follows suit. Ultimate Falcon is immediately caught by Smarty Pants Richards, and is given free reign to report everything he sees in the City of Tomorrow (which is less a city, more an expanding nation at this point). Why bother with subterfuge, and clandestine missions, when the evil genius has already won? He didn’t send a giant Vagina-Monster on the populace (a la Watchmen for those keeping score at home), but for all intents and purposes, he’s Ozymandias. Simply put, each scene in the book presents people debating how to “fight”, or how to accept change, but ultimately fall back on the “but. we. already. lost.” mentality. It drapes the whole book narratively in a wash of grey.

Art duties this time around are shared by Brandon Peterson and Esad Ribic. Ribic, the artist who started the volume, continues to deliver the goods; Beautifully designed pages. evocative emotions on realistic looking characters, and beautifully rendered backgrounds. In direct opposition to this, Peterson’s pages are just plain ugly and lazy. In the aforementioned Steve Rogers sequence, it’s obvious that Peterson declined to draw backgrounds. His colorist was forced to create a photoshopped fire pit that appears to be somehow short of reaching super nova. It’s distracting, unneeded, and transparently ill-fitting. Worse though, are his sharp faces, and lithe bodies. A scene with Tony Stark and Thor (who is introduced as Jarvis, or Jarvis became a Nordic God??) left me asking how old Tony actually is. There’s a rule in illustration, that every line on a face adds age. Based on Peterson’s renderings, Tony’s a day shy of turning 862. Even better, slap a mullet on him, and you get the design for Captain Britain. The less I say about his scene in this book, the better.

When it comes down to brass tacks, I guess I’m between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately the Ultimate Ultimates of the Ultimatumly Ultimized Universe are interesting enough to read, if amazingly depressing. The choice to explore Reed Richards as a villain is enough to keep me coming back, even if the book has failed to make me care about the good guys just yet. It took no less than a handful of pages in the very first volume of the book (back with scribe Mark Millar, and artist Bryan Hitch) to make me fall in love. Hickman, in contrast, likes a slow burn on his stories. I’m willing to travel down the rabbit hole a few issues longer. So long as Ribic takes the reigns back for the art, it’ll be a pretty journey to take—even if I don’t quite understand it all, and need to watch a few kitten videos on YouTube afterwards.