By Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-0960-0
After Marvel’s financial problems and creative impasse in the late 1990s, the company took stock, braced itself and came back swinging. A critical new concept was the remodelling and modernising of their core characters for the new youth culture.
The Ultimate imprint abandoned monumental continuity – which had always been Marvel’s greatest asset – to re-imagine major characters in their own self-sufficient universe, offering varying degrees of radical makeover to appeal to the contemporary 21st century audience and offer them a chance to get in on the ground floor.
These revised star concepts all sported fresh, fashionable, modernistic, scientifically feasible rationales for all those insane super-abilities and freaks manifesting everywhere…
The nervy publishing experiment began in 2000 with a post-modern take on the Ultimate Spider-Man. Ultimate X-Men followed in 2001, and the Mighty Avengers were radically refashioned into The Ultimates in 2002 with Ultimate Fantastic Four finally and officially joining the party in 2004.
Creepy vigilante Spider-Man was still Peter Parker but now the secrets of the high-school geek – brilliant but bullied by his physical superiors – were shared with certain loved ones. The world was increasingly plagued by mutants: a dangerous, oppressed ethnic minority scaring the pants off the ordinary Americans they hid amongst.
The still clandestine Fantastic Four were two science nerds and their dim pals transformed by a science accident into monsters, and global peacekeeping militia S.H.I.E.L.D. had a UN mandate to keep a wary eye on anything or -body regarded as extraordinary.
The stories, design and even tone of the heroes were retooled for the perceived-as-different tastes of a more mature readership: those tired of or unwilling to stick with precepts originated by inspirational founding fathers Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, or (hopefully) new consumers unprepared or unwilling to deal with five decades (seven if you include Golden Age Timely tales retroactively co-opted into the mix) of interconnected story baggage.
This new universe quickly prospered and soon filled up with more refashioned, morally ambiguous heroes and villains but eventually even this darkly nihilistic new universe became as continuity-constricted as its ancestor.
Eventually, in 2008, imprint-wide decluttering exercise “Ultimatum†culminated in a reign of terror which excised dozens of superhumans and millions of lesser mortals in a devastating tsunami which inundated Manhattan, courtesy of mutant menace Magneto…
Long before that, however, the third reinvention to win a (semi) regular series was The Ultimates and this slim volume collects the first stunning story-arc (spanning March-August 2002), revealing the less-than-noble motives behind forming the team whilst scrutinising the pitifully flawed individuals who will eventually comprise the squad…
Written by Mark Millar with art by Bryan Hitch & Andrew Currie, it all begins in 1945 with ‘Super-Human’ as Captain America leads an American Army raid on an impregnable Nazi base in Iceland.
Steve Rogers has been chemically remade into the perfect warrior. The grimly uncompromising symbol of freedom is the only successful result of a project to create super-soldiers but has turned the tide in numerous battles across the war torn world. Now, with combat companion Bucky Barnes and a battalion of doomed men, he races to stop a prototype atomic missile aimed at the heart of the Land of the Free.
Too late to prevent the hell-weapon’s launch, the valiant crusader clings to the missile and suicidally brings it down over the polar seas, saving the world and passing into legend…
And in 2002, at the top of Mount Everest, controversial industrialist Tony Stark makes a decision that will change his world forever…
The second chapter begins right now in New York City following the devastating rampage of a monstrous Hulk. Robert Bruce Banner had been working on recreating the super-soldier formula for years but had only succeeded in turning himself into an unstoppable horror of unrepressed rage which tore the city apart and terrified the teeming masses of the world
Now his boss – S.H.I.E.L.D. supremo Nick Fury – approaches the supposedly cured and recuperating Banner regarding a long-term plan to create a state-controlled team of metahumans to face the uncertainties of the rapidly changing world. Banner had been in charge of the R&D, but now Fury is bringing in a despised rival over him to lead the project…
At the Super-Soldier Research Facility in Pittsburgh biologist Henry Pym and his wife Janet Van Dyne are celebrating their promotions. Pym has already demonstrated devices that allow him to control insects but his greatest success is Jan herself.
She can reduce her size, grow wings and fire devastating stings. The arrogant scientist can’t wait to laud all his new ideas for superhumans over Banner…
Back in the Big Apple Stark is exulting in his new Iron Man armour and discussing his upcoming role in the slowly coalescing team S.H.I.E.L.D. super-team with Fury.
At S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new HQ – the Triskelion – Pym smugly confronts his disgraced and fallen rival before demonstrating his newest triumph by growing extremely ‘Big’…
Relegated to the fruitless and seemingly impossible dead-end task of recreating the original super-soldier serum, Banner’s self-respect takes another agonising knock after hearing how a Stark deep sea expedition has recovered the still living body of Captain America…
’21st Century Boy’ opens with Pym testing his abilities in his new costumed identity as Giant Man before switching scenes to the Triskelion where Banner and Fury’s interview with Steve Rogers goes catastrophically awry. Only Pym’s last minute intervention stops the revived and disbelieving hero from trashing the entire base…
With Fury as his guide Rogers slowly reconciles to life decades after he “diedâ€, but visiting the aged and dying Bucky (who married Steve’s fiancée after he was lost) and his own parents’ graves only fills him the ultimate warrior with apathy. It takes a direct request from the current President to convince Captain America to join Fury’s growing squadron of metahumans…
In ‘Thunder’, as Jan helps Steve adapt to the everyday shocks of living in the future, Fury pursues his last selection for the team. However Thor is utterly unlike the others, free from ambition, patriotism or informed self-interest. The libertarian rebel, radical activist and anti-capitalist hippie claims to be an actual god and wants nothing to do with state-sponsored fascism…
Frustrated, Fury returns home in time to be drawn into a session of badinage and mockery aimed at the now-redundant Banner and his new team’s lack of anybody to fight. The chinwagging is overheard by the crushed scientist who subsequently uses Rogers’ blood samples to amp up his own chemical concoctions. Before long the monster is loose again and providing the PR opportunity The Ultimates have been begging for…
‘Hulk Does Manhattan’ finds the mismatched and woefully unprepared team chasing the terrifying engine of destruction as he catastrophically tears through the city, but they are no match for the beast until Thor – ever-mindful of the harm inflicted upon innocent mortals – explosively and unexpectedly joins the fight…
This first outing then ends on a disturbingly dark note as Thor, Rogers and Stark have a frank and distressing discussion of their possible futures even as ‘Giant Man vs. The Wasp’ exposes the toxic relationship of the apparently perfect metahuman couple.
As the lovers’ argument escalates, the true secret of Jan’s powers is exposed, things are said which can’t be unsaid and the domestic dispute explodes into wilful murder…
To Be Continued…
With a cover-&-variants gallery by Hitch, Currie & Paul Mounts, this fascinatingly slick and cynical saga offers a sharp and sinister entrée into one of Marvel’s other Universes that will impress open-minded vintage fans of the medium just as much as the newcomers they were ostensibly aiming for. Moreover, if you’re a fan of Marvel’s movie enterprises, this is one of the tales that most resemble – and, indeed, informed – them, so you should be right at home…
© 2002, 2005 Marvel Characters Inc. All rights reserved.