Ultra: Seven Days

Ultra: Seven Days 

By The Luna Brothers (Image)
ISBN 1582404836

We live in an age of celebrity. It is ghastly, but it is true. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before the venerable old super-hero genre got the treatment. Ultra is the “Hello” of the super set, dishing the Goss on the paranormals who live among us, complete with their Agents, Managers, stylists, entourages, trade associations and parasitic tabloid paparazzi.

The concept isn’t exactly fresh but the creators take it to its considered extreme, by concentrating on a week in the lives of three “typical” heroines when they aren’t world-saving, striving to illuminate the human in “Super-human”. Sadly, for me at least, the same type of contrived romantic entanglements and stagy, forced comedic set-ups that made me quit Ally McBeal at the end of season one and makes me immune to soap-operas and reality TV, made this feel like laborious and stilted twinky-fodder.

Another problem is the overly mannered artwork. Perhaps the drab and stilted pictures are intended as a metaphor for the bland, inconsequential subject matter, but the conceit of using “actual pages from Ultra” as a staging device is overused and the text pages rather than adding insight finally became a chore to read.

There’s an odd quirk that makes us overly interested in how the famous live, who they’re shagging, what they wear (obviously very little in a book about super-heroines aimed at a comic-book audience) and I’m sure someone’s already bought the movie option for “I’m-A-Celebrity-Who-Can-Eat-Steel-So-You-Better-Get-Me-Out-Of Here-If-You-Know-What’s-Good-For-You”, so I’m sure I’m wasting time whining here, but that’s just me.

And as for that quirk? I resist it. If we all did, maybe all those celebrities would stop primping for us and get on with their lives, too.

™ & © 2005 The Luna Brothers. All Rights Reserved.