So, can someone explain why that Skrull is with the Squadron Supreme in Ultimate Power #9?
Did I miss something?
Did I miss something?
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Amazing Spider-Man #545
I've just read Amazing Spider-Man #545.
I am speechless at the sheer awfulness of it.
I don't think I would've had a problem with the 'reset' thing if the story had actually been any good.
I am speechless at the sheer awfulness of it.
I don't think I would've had a problem with the 'reset' thing if the story had actually been any good.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Blog, Blogged, Blogging
The human race has achieved many, many wonderous things across the centuries: we've dived into the deepest oceans, climbed the highest mountains, cured myriad diseases, imagined and created technology to do just about anything you can think of, but yet no one can invent blogging software that's easy to format text with...
Friday, December 07, 2007
Ultimates 3
So, was it just me or was The Ultimates 3 #1, you know, crap?
Although this isn't Yet Another Comics Blog, I just wanted to vent my spleen about this complete load of bollocks in the vain hope that someone out there agrees with me and may actually stop Marvel from publishing any more of this garbage.
I was a big fan of the original Ultimates series. I thought it was one of the best books I'd read in a long time, and I loved what Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did with it. The whole cinematic storytelling they adopted for it was like a breath of fresh air for me and showed just how to write a self contained 13 issue comic series (or 2 trade collections) with spot on characterisation and no sagging in the middle. It was a lean, mean comic, with all the fat trimmed from it. It was like the Sean Connery of Marvel's Ultimate line.
Then we have Ultimates 3 by Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira, which is shaping up to be George Lazenby.
Madureira's artwork is functional (sorry, but I'm not a fan and nothing I've seen here is changing my mind!), totally lacking any of the punch and outright 'wow' factor that Hitch brought to the original series. Gone are the cinematic 'camera angles' and in come the ridiculous posing and posturing - none of which are exactly helped by the murky colouring. But I really want to know what the score is with the 'new' character designs: I don't recall Ultimate Venom having that white spider-logo thing on his chest... And why's The Wasp wearing a mask? To hide her identity? Her public identity? And didn't she used to be Asian?
However, it's the writing where things really fall down. Loeb foists a, frankly, dull script on us, totally lacking any of the verve or sharpness of Millar's previous efforts. In fact, I've gone from liking these characters to being totally apathetic about them in the space of 22 pages. Now that's quite a feat.
Tony Stark goes from being the ultimate optimist to being a drunken layabout drowning his sorrows (even though Millar established that he could get through just about anything with enough beautiful women to bed - and I don't think Ultimate Tony Stark would be even the slightest bit upset about a sex video doing the rounds on the Internet - the way Millar originally wrote him, you'd kind of expect him to be not in the least bit bothered that yet another sex tape of him has surfaced); Ultimate Venom appears to have traded places with his mainstream counterpart and the Black Panther is...well, the Black Panther (Loeb's stated that he wants Ultimate Black Panther to be the Batman-figure of the team, but to do that, we need to know something about him, maybe like how he joined the team. Or who he is. Or why we should care. Same goes for Valkyrie.)
And what's the deal with revealing the relationship between Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch? Is that Loeb trying to be 'controversial' by telling us something we can work out for ourselves?
And as for the Scarlett Witch's 'killer': it's Bullseye.
I mean, Hawkeye.
Who's going to become Bullseye.
(Look, Loeb may as well just have a big sign around his neck saying that because he couldn't make it more obvious! Although, personally, I'd settle for knowing why an Olympic level archer who's never used guns in his previous appearances has started using them now.)
Only one issue in and I can already hear Millar and Hitch turning in their graves...
Although this isn't Yet Another Comics Blog, I just wanted to vent my spleen about this complete load of bollocks in the vain hope that someone out there agrees with me and may actually stop Marvel from publishing any more of this garbage.
I was a big fan of the original Ultimates series. I thought it was one of the best books I'd read in a long time, and I loved what Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did with it. The whole cinematic storytelling they adopted for it was like a breath of fresh air for me and showed just how to write a self contained 13 issue comic series (or 2 trade collections) with spot on characterisation and no sagging in the middle. It was a lean, mean comic, with all the fat trimmed from it. It was like the Sean Connery of Marvel's Ultimate line.
Then we have Ultimates 3 by Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira, which is shaping up to be George Lazenby.
Madureira's artwork is functional (sorry, but I'm not a fan and nothing I've seen here is changing my mind!), totally lacking any of the punch and outright 'wow' factor that Hitch brought to the original series. Gone are the cinematic 'camera angles' and in come the ridiculous posing and posturing - none of which are exactly helped by the murky colouring. But I really want to know what the score is with the 'new' character designs: I don't recall Ultimate Venom having that white spider-logo thing on his chest... And why's The Wasp wearing a mask? To hide her identity? Her public identity? And didn't she used to be Asian?
However, it's the writing where things really fall down. Loeb foists a, frankly, dull script on us, totally lacking any of the verve or sharpness of Millar's previous efforts. In fact, I've gone from liking these characters to being totally apathetic about them in the space of 22 pages. Now that's quite a feat.
Tony Stark goes from being the ultimate optimist to being a drunken layabout drowning his sorrows (even though Millar established that he could get through just about anything with enough beautiful women to bed - and I don't think Ultimate Tony Stark would be even the slightest bit upset about a sex video doing the rounds on the Internet - the way Millar originally wrote him, you'd kind of expect him to be not in the least bit bothered that yet another sex tape of him has surfaced); Ultimate Venom appears to have traded places with his mainstream counterpart and the Black Panther is...well, the Black Panther (Loeb's stated that he wants Ultimate Black Panther to be the Batman-figure of the team, but to do that, we need to know something about him, maybe like how he joined the team. Or who he is. Or why we should care. Same goes for Valkyrie.)
And what's the deal with revealing the relationship between Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch? Is that Loeb trying to be 'controversial' by telling us something we can work out for ourselves?
And as for the Scarlett Witch's 'killer': it's Bullseye.
I mean, Hawkeye.
Who's going to become Bullseye.
(Look, Loeb may as well just have a big sign around his neck saying that because he couldn't make it more obvious! Although, personally, I'd settle for knowing why an Olympic level archer who's never used guns in his previous appearances has started using them now.)
Only one issue in and I can already hear Millar and Hitch turning in their graves...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
