Review: Emperor Joker

If you're reading this collection of the millennial Superman line story arc of the same name, which comprised two issues of each of the then extant four Superman books, plus an over-sized one-shot, then you already know the basic premise, as the title Emperor Joker and the crown and ermine wearing Bat-villain is right there on the cover.

The story would have been a bit more mysterious as it originally played out, however, as the first four issues merely presented the reader with a world gone mad. A semi-amnesiac Superman, now wearing a black costume and some serious five o'clock shadow, escapes from Arkham Asylum every night, using his scaled-back powers to try to figure out what's gone wrong with the world around him. And every night the leader of the JLA, Bizarro #1—a pure, undiluted, unapologetic version of the Silver Age Bizarro—fights and re-captures Superman, bringing him back to Arkham.

In this world, there's no Lex Luthor, but a bald, Lois Lane is Metropolis' maniacal, super-villain industrialist. Jimmy Olsen is Bizarro #1's pal and sidekick, Gravedigger Lad, enthusiastically tending The Graveyard of Solitude. Supergirl is a nun in a convent that worships Alfred E. Neuman, Superboy flips burgers at a fast food restaurant run by The Guardian and Steel is an asylum for scientists.

The JLA's lunar watchtower is where Bizarro meets with a group of "heroes" who look and sound more like villains—Bounty, Ignition, Scorch, Poisonous Ivy, Skizm and, um, Gorgeous Gilly—while the old Justice League are criminals appearing in strange, cartoonish forms (Martian Manhunter is more like the Martian from the Looney Tunes cartoons, for example).

The Justice League, by either Duncan Rouleau or Carlo Barberi; I'm leaning toward Rouleau.

No one's heard of a Batman, but every night the blood-curdling screams of someone dying horribly can be heard, and Mr. Mxyzptlk is somehow mixed-up in all of it, although he's not responsible.

The only real clue as to what the hell was going on for the four-issue prologue were the covers, which featured various members of the Superman family and various villains of the story arc in a playing card design, echoing that of the cover of the collection.

That and, of course, the fact that Superman finds himself incarcerated in Arkham, I suppose.

What the hell is going on is this: Mr Mxyzptlk had the bright idea to recruit The Joker to help him mess with Superman, intending only to grant him a tiny fraction of his Fifth Dimensional magic powers, but accidentally giving him all but a tiny fraction, so that The Joker was able to reshape the entire universe as he saw fit, with only a few tiny flaws in his now omnipotent mastery of the universe (Like the fact that Mxyzptlk is still around to offer exposition, that Superman has an indomitable will and the ability to inspire those around him and that The Joker just can't bring himself to do away with Batman, choosing instead to have him horribly killed every night...and then resurrected to wash, rinse and repeat).

I returned to the storyline just recently, inspired to revisit some previous Joker vs. The DC Universe storylines by my reading of the recent The Joker: The Death of The Family collection. It holds up pretty well, but, like all such story arcs involving so many of the always-moving pieces of a Big Two superhero universe, it's very much a product of its time, reflective of rather particular versions of the many characters (versions that have gone through a good half-dozen changes in the 13 years since it was originally published serially) and of the particular talents and publishing strategy of the DC Comics of the time.

Ed McGuinness, a quintessential Superman artist, able to rather seamlessly fuse modern, stylistic sensibilities with the stripped-down, simple designs of the Superman characters, and a real master at drawing big, beefy looking characters that nevertheless seem to bounce, float and fly weightlessly, draws the opening chapter and a later 22-page chunk of the story, as well as providing five of the nine  covers.

As this was a story that ran "triangle"-style through the Superman books and in a special, there are an awful lot of artists involved, with Mike Miller, Kano and Doug Mahnke handling the bulk of the non-McGuinness pencils, and Duncan Rouleau, Todd Nauck, Carlo Barberi and Scott McDaniel pitching in as well. It's a wide variety of artists, but it's not too hard to see them all bunched rather close together on the spectrum of cartoony, manga-influenced superhero art, with Mahnke's more realistic style being the greatest outlier—although it's worth remembers that Mahnke is a pretty consumate drawer of superhero comedy, as he's demonstrated in the short-lived Major Bummer and that Hitman/Lobo one-shot, and he acquits himself nicely here.

The writers involved were those of teh Superman line at the time: Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Schultz.  The style of the scripting, not unlike the style of the art, shifts widely from chapter to chapter, but this being the "graphic novel" about a madman given the power to warp any and every aspect of reality to suit his whim, that's hardly the drawback it would have been in other works.

This Joker, like that in Last Laugh (and unlike the one in Death of The Family), is presented as a dark cartoon character, always making jokes and, indeed, here making the world one full of his jokes, and the sense of humor on display tends to feel pretty flat and forced, seeing that it is forced, the various writers all trying to write funny. Or, more specifically, Joker funny. As far as humor goes, it seems to work best where Bizarro is concerned, as the opposite talk with ever-shifting rules is such a perfect comic book gag, akin to the backwards spells of Zatanna or, more appropriate here, Mxyzptlk's return trip spell.

Ed McGuinness, obviously.

Mahnke's artwork brings much of the humor that is here to the fore too, whether it's really going to town filling in backgrounds with his idea of "crazy" imagery (which is a lot more twisted under his more realistic style than in that of the others)...

...or the manical expression on Bizarro's face...

or the wide-eyed surprise on that of our hero...

As a superhero story, I suspect this might have rather sharply divided readers at the time, as it so prominently includes two aspects of the Superman mythos that some readers seem to be somewhat embarrassed by—Mxy and Bizarro—and, hell, even some DC creators seem embarrassed by them. Note chief creative officer Geoff Johns' repeated attempts to present us with a scary version of the backwards-Superman, like the monster threatening a school bus full of children in the opening arc of  his short Action Comics run, or the brutal killer version that beat The Human Bomb to death with his bare hands in Infinite Crisis #1, or the Frankenstein-like, New 52 version currently receiving an origin in the pages of Forever Evil (On the other hand, Johns did do a pretty fun story with Eric Powell in "Escape From Bizarro World," in which he presented the more traditional version of the character).

As for me, those are my two favorite Superman adversaries.

The day is eventually, ultimately saved, in a scene that would be echoed in Paul Cornell's Action Comics story arc "The Black Ring" a decade or so later, with Superman facing a Joker with the god-like powers to do almost anything, and the hero managing to exploit that single weakness, allowing the villain to defeat himself (In "Black Ring," of course, it was an omnipotent Luthor who was facing Superman at the story's climax, rather than the omnipotent Joker).

What's impressive about it is the way the writers start with Superman and then draw a circular, spinning, curlycue-ing line out from that point, until their story isn't just one of Superman fighting a Batman villain, but a story that involves all of Metropolis, all of the world, all of the DC Universe (By story's end, "The Quintessence," Darkseid and The Spectre are also involved, in addition to all of the heroes and villains and supporting characters already mentioned. Oh, and there are even some cameos like those in the panel below).

See Pandora? Swamp Thing was part of  the DC Universe as late as 2000.

While the New 52 ultimately wiped this and these versions of all the characters out of continuity, the story was also noteworthy for a time in presenting the origin of the post-Crisis Bizarro that lasted the longest and most resembled the pre-Crisis Bizarro (prior to this, the in-continuity Bizarros were merely short-lived, failed cloning experiments conducted by Luthor) and for adding a few new minor characters to the DCU, in Ignition (who would play a role in a future Superman storyline) and Scorch (who would be involved in both future Superman stories and a significant portion of Joe Kelly's JLA run, when she dates Martian Manhunter, helps him overcome his aversion to flame, and accidentally unleashes Fernus).

It was at least well-liked enough to generate this trade collection, and to have inspired an episode of The Batman: The Brave and The Bold, in which The Joker gets 5D imp Bat-Mite's powers and uses them to kill Batman over and over, albeit it in more cartoon friendly ways. That is, nothing as grisly as the scene in this story in which Batman is eaten alive by vultures, tastefully shown just off-panel. It's actually kind of strange to see the restraint in scenes like this...

Kano

...given all the gore of the DCU of just a few years later.

There's even a scene where Jimmy Olsen apparently kills "Krypto" (Superman in the form of an ordinary dog that looks like Krypto) with a shovel, that not only happened off-panel (we don't see the shovel strike the dog, just the sound of the shovel hitting the ground), but then it's edited in a way that doesn't really make any sense, as if DC were trying to soften the act of killing a dog with a shovel.

I actually can't really make out what happened:

The falling fire hydrant seems to imply The Joker smooshed Superman-as-Krypto with his magic powers, but the dialogue refers only to Jimmy killing Superman-as-Krypto.

But back to the book at hand: Not bad, and a great example of Superman as the center of the DC Universe, in addition to being its greatest hero.

Happy Mother's Day to everyone who's not Batman!

Review: Hulk Vol. 3: Hulk No More

This comic filled me with a deep sense of existential dread. It is written by Jeph Loeb, so I expected some sort of negative feelings to surface during the reading experience (and be mitigated by the fact that this volume features the Defenders drawn in Ed McGuinness’ Masters of the Universe figures-filled-with helium style), but I wasn’t expecting to end up pondering the lack of meaning in comic book superhero adventures—heck, in life itself!—before I was half way through the collection.

I’m well aware that comic book characters like The Hulk aren’t really real in the way that you and I are real, and that what occurs in comic books featuring him is merely whatever the editors, writers and artists want to have occur to him. He’s a character, a license, a logo, forced to dance to the whims of whoever happens to be collecting paychecks in return for making him dance for our enjoyment in any given month.

To what end? Well, whatever other goals or motivations certain creators may have, it is ultimately to entertain readers, I suppose, enough so that they will pay another $3.99 the following month for more of the same.

That’s true of all corporate super-comics, but I can’t remember ever having read one that was as obvious about it as the opening three-issue story arc collected in this volume.

The Grandmaster, a cosmic god of the Marvel Universe, tells our hero that he can give him back a dead past love of his (Jarella, as referenced in a brief, three-page flashback) if The Hulk promises to fight to the death in a game of his.

The Hulk agrees, and hand-picks a team: Namor, Dr. Strange and The Silver Surfer, each pulled from the moment in their pasts where they similarly lost their lady loves, and given the same deal.

The Red Hulk, meanwhile, is playing for The Grandmaster’s brother, The Collector, and has put together his own team of evil opposites, The Offenders: Baron Mordo, Terrax and Tiger Shark.

They fight for a couple of issues, Marvel villains enter the fray, things occur with little rhyme or reason (for example, a two-page splash—of a $3.99 comic book!—is devoted to Tiger Shark chomping on Namor’s throat with admantium teeth, but the Avenging Son doesn’t even suffer a wound), and ultimately The Red Hulk kills everybody, and everyone then gets brought back to life with their memories wiped of the entire event.

So three issues later, nothing has changed for any of the characters at all, and it was as if the story arc never even happened.

At least I got to see McGuinness draw Namor though, and, of course, there’s this:

That is fantastic. Jeph Loeb got paid in U.S. dollars to write something like:

Two-page Splash.

Red Hulk is on the Silver Surfer’s surfboard, holding Terrax’s ax in one hand and shooting the power cosmic out of his other hand while flying through space.

RED HULK: Most fun I ever had with my clothes on!

That fact is honestly a more awe and wonder-inducing than any event that occurs within the story.

After the Defenders vs. Offenders trifle ends, Loeb and McGuinness get back to the business of teasing the Red Hulk’s origins. Incredible Hulk #600 was the issue solicited like so:

WHO IS THE RED HULK?! THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN IS GOING TO TRY AND FIND OUT! GREEN HULK! RED HULK! SPIDEY! SECRETS REVEALED!

Sort of makes it sound like it would be the one revealing Red Hulk’s true identity (Betty Ross. It has to be Betty Ross, right?), doesn’t it? It does no such thing.

“Seeing Red” opens and closes with Ben Urich, the only reporter in the Marvel Universe, in front of his type-writer, banging out a “This story will never see print” story, about how government conspiracy he stumbled upon, revealing that a military agency is actually the invention of MODOK and AIM, and dedicated the research of Hulks. Spider-Man, She-Hulk, Doc Samson and Rick “A-Bomb” Jones all guest-star. Red Hulk’s origin and identity remain undiscussed, but Bruce Banner loses his ability to transform back into the Hulk after all of his gamma radiation is sucked out of him.

Finally, in the title story, “Hulk No More,” Norman Osborn attempts to find out whether or not Banner can turn into the Hulk any more…by having Ares attack him.

These last two stories seem oddly disconnected from the first one, which has nothing to do with it save the presence of the two Hulk characters (and the creative team), so the book reads a bit like some sort of graphic novel version of a flip-book, rather than part of a unified, ongoing storyline.

Despite its soul-troubling meaninglessness and Loeb’s…Loeb-ishness, looking at McGuinness playing with Marvel character designs old and new isn’t a bad way to spend the better part of an hour. Of course, I say that as someone who read Hulk No More in a trade I borrowed from a library.

I imagine I wouldn’t feel the same if I dropped $16 on it, or the…let’s see…$21 it would have cost to read these stories in single issue format. There’s an awful lot of splashes and double-page splashes, and a real scarcity of story for such expensive comics.

A few words about two new comics I'm probably not going to read anyway

There’s something kind of fascinating about Ultimate Comics X, or, as it appears on the cover of the book, “Ultimate X.” The image above was first revealed in a house ad, and its mainly notable only for the fact that the character being focused on looks to be an original one, albeit an original character with Wolverine’s claws on him.

The Ultimate/Ultimate Comics universe has been rather notorious in its inability to introduce brand-new characters instead of simply Ultimatizing versions of pre-existing Marvel characters.

Brian Michael Bendis’ sole new invention from Ultimate Spider-Man, a mutant high-schooler named Geldoff, immediately became a sort of punchline with which Bendis’ boss Joe Quesada could rib him with.

The Batman and Robin-like characters in Ron Zimmerman and Duncan Fegredo’s 2002 six-parter Ultimate Adventures, Hawk-Owl and Woody, showed some promise (the series wasn’t bad, at any rate). But they never appeared again.

The solicitation for Ultimate Comics X is extremely vague, but it seems to be spinning out of Loeb’s own Ultimatum (Which, sorry guys, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read, even for free from the library), and to deal with new characters in the Ultimate Universe.

Here’s the solicitation in full:

Who—or what—is Ultimate X? The answers and even more secrets arrive in the all new ULTIMATE X ongoing bi-monthly series from the superstar dream team of JEPH LOEB and ART ADAMS. Wolverine is dead. Captain America is a fugitive. The Fantastic Four disbanded. Lives have been destroyed and nothing can ever be the same—is there any hope left? It all begins with a search for a brand new character whose identity will leave jaws on the floor and change the Ultimate Universe forever.

The What the hell is going on here? element of the marketing, along with the promise of something original (well, somewhat original-esque) and the presence of Arthur Adams is sort of intriguing, but pretty much negated by the presence of writer Loeb, a $4 price tag, and the fact that even a bi-monthly schedule is probably way too much wishful thinking from this creative team.

This image really should have smothered any lingering embers of interest in the book though, Adams art or no Adams art:
That’s a scan of a house ad for the book, but it looks like that’s also a variant cover for the first issue (the solicitation mentions four variants, one of which is called a “Spoiler Line-Up Variant” by Adams).

You can’t really get more stereotypically ‘90s in your team make-up than two Bad Boy types (one of which is even badder than the regular strength Bad Boy type), a Sexy Girl and a Big Giant Strong Guy (Here a/the Ultimate Hulk, which may be of some interest maybe?).

I’m sure there’s an audience for ‘90s nostalgia comics, but I wouldn’t have expected Marvel’s Ultimate Comics line to be the place for it (Of course, inter-book crossovers, new numbering, variant covers and “foilogram” covers are similarly antithetical to the Ultimate line’s original reason for being, so perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising).

Anyway, that cover dashed whatever small hope the initial image gave me that this might be Marvel trying something rather radically new with the book.

Finally, I know it’s probably not all that fair to complain about superhero character designs being derivative in the year 2010—after almost 80 years of superheroes, just about every one of them is derivative of some other one—but I can’t really look at this guy, the one behind the blond Wolver-teen,

without seeing this guy
He’s Mongrel, a "darkforce-blasting African American-Vietnamese hero" who appeared during DC’s 1993 summer crossover event.

Loeb participated in the event, but he didn’t write Mongrel. Instead, he introduced Loose Cannon, a character who was basically The Hulk with a terrible haircut, but instead of green, he could change colors from blue to purple to red. Hey, wait a minute…!


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As long as we’re discussing comics shipping tomorrow that owe a great debt the comics of the 1990s, it’s probably worth mentioning Milestone Forever #1.

It’s a very strange project, and one I have to assume was dramatically scaled back from what DC and its principal creator, writer Dwayne McDuffie, must have originally had in mind.

Check out what DC has to say about it on dccomics.com:

DC Comics and Milestone Media entered into an unprecedented creative partnership 16 years ago this month by producing 14 interlocking, creator-owned titles including HARDWARE, ICON, and the multimedia hit that would best be known as STATIC SHOCK. Now, nine Parents Choice Awards, four Eisner Award nominations, and one Emmy and Humanitas Award-winning hit TV series later, Milestone is back, its continuity mysteriously merged with the DCU.

While we saw the DC side of the story in JUSTICE LEAGUE: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, the 2-issue MILESTONE FOREVER gathers the original artists from Milestone's launch titles – including John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Milestone founder Denys Cowan – to complete the tales told in the original runs of STATIC SHOCK, ICON, HARDWARE, SHADOW CABINET and BLOOD SYNDICATE. Milestone editor-in-chief Dwayne McDuffie reveals the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.

That sounds awfully ambitious, doesn’t it? Completing the stories of at five different ongoing series, while moving ahead with “the birth of something new”?

And yet all of that is going to be accomplished in the space of just two 48-page comics. That’s—wait, let me double-check on a calculator–only 96 pages. McDuffie introduced the Milestone characters into the DCU over the course of about six or seven issues of his run on Justice League of America—the collection of that story folding the one universe into the other is 176-pages long.

What really brought my attention to how, well, skimpy the Milestone book is going to be, the vast disparity between what it is apparently meant to accomplish and how much space is being allotted to it, was that I noticed this week DC is also shipping The Great Ten #4.

The Great Ten is an ideal example of the “Why is DC publishing this?” class of books in their line. It stars a group of minor characters from a 2006 event series that no one seemed particularly interested in reading much more about, it’s written by Tony Bedard, DC’s ill-used, go-to fill-in writer, and it’s drawn by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens, DC’s main “These guys work fast, drop this in their laps” art team.

It is ten issues long.

So McDuffie and a half-dozen Milestone creators are given just 96 pages to reveal “the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.”

And Bedard, McDaniel and Owens are given 220 pages to…I don’t know…keep an IP of dubious value in the public eye for the better part of a year? And by public eye I mean direct market retailers and maybe a few thousand of their customers According to The Beat, the first issue of The Great Ten moved only about 13,160 units, and sales are almost always all downhill after the first issue of a limited series.

Another weird thing about that Hulk Vol. 2 trade?

It's rated "A," which Marvel indicates is material, "Appropriate for ages 9 and up."






I think their ratings system is sort of silly in general, but I was sort of surprised to see that "A" on the back of the back cover, instead of a "T+" ("Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they may want to read before or with younger children") or "Parental Advisory" ("15+ years old similar to T+ but featuring more mature themes and/or more graphic imagery. Recommended for teen and adult readers").

I can't imagine Loeb and Cho were thinking about nine-year-old readers when doing that locker room scene at the top of this post, for example. (And man, what the fuck is up with Spider-Woman's gesture in that last panel? Is she stifling a laugh, or eating an invisible banana, or...?)

Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green is a very strange collection.

I didn’t exactly have high hopes for Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green. Jeph Loeb wrote it, and his entire bibliography tends to range from fair on the high end to The Worst Comics Ever Written on the low end. I had read the previous volume, and it wasn’t very good (Though not terrible either; I was actually sort of pleasantly surprised that it seemed to be Loeb writing in his Superman/Batman cameo-and-splash pages mode, instead of Mark Millar-but-even-dumber Ultimates mode).

So I didn’t expect Red and Green to be a good comic, but I was completely unprepared for how strange a comics work it is.

It make very little sense, and not merely in the usual this doesn’t obey the rules of good fiction or narrative structure or “Holy shit, they are paying this guy real actual American money for this?” sorts of ways, but even at the most basic, structural level, I was confused by the book.

The fine print on the title page says the trade collection I borrowed from the library “contains material originally published in magazine form as Hulk #7-9 and King-Size Hulk #1.” I only went back and checked that because the book seemed composed entirely of 8 to 11-page mini-stories, each set apart by a new cover image and brief introduction or title and ending with a cliffhanger or climactic event.

I thought that perhaps the chapters only seemed short given Loeb’s tendency to put as few panels as possible in his scripts, but when I went back and counted the pages of the segments, they did indeed turn out to be the length of back-ups, rather than 22-page feature stories.

I’m not sure how this book was put together exactly, or what its source material—those comics “originally published in magazine form”—actually looked like, and that ended up being just one more thing for me to puzzle over why wading through Red and Green’s 120 ponderous pages.

The volume opens with Loeb’s usual Chris Claremont-style first-person narration, from a character telling us, “My name is Bruce Banner. I am THE HULK.” He spends a few panels telling us all about the extraordinary security measures SHIELD has taken to keep him calm and unable to turn into the Hulk and/or escape his cell. He will narrate the first mini-story of the book, despite not being present during it (which he at least notes; his narration is his attempt to reconstruct the events).

I was shaking my head by the second page, during the course of which Loeb has Banner say: “THIS Hulk does things I never did. Like using a GUN. Which I’ve done.”

How can those three sentences be strung together like that by a grown-up? How can an editor or six read it, and a letter put it on the page? My mind was boggled and I was sputtering to myself on page two. I still had 118 to go.

In this story, the Red Hulk makes camp somewhere in the frozen north (despite a bunch of place name-dropping, Banner never tells us where “there” actually is), and is attacked by The Wendigo, a Marvel monster probably most famous for being in the issue of The Incredible Hulk in which Wolverine was first introduced.

Actually, Banner notes, this is a Wendigo, not The Wendigo. (This will be important later on). Where do they come from? Dr. Banner explains that they are: “Mystical creatures born out of humans who feast on…human flesh. CANNIBALISM.” (Yes, he actually, redundantly adds the all-caps “CANNIBALISM” there. The narration, by the way, is being written on a yellow legal pad by Banner, and appears in little narration boxes that look like squares of yellow legal pad paper with handwriting on them. That means Banner occasionally writes words in all-caps like that. And that he actually wrote out “…” before writing the words “human flesh” in the above sentence. This is only page three, and Red and Green has already become awesomely terrible. That is the secret of Loeb’s success, I guess).

The Red Hulk butchers the Wendigo with his Hulk-sized hunting knife and jumps away, leaving the pieces of his foe’s body to be devoured by a pack of Wendigos. In the last panel, the unidentified General Ross—who won’t appear again in this volume—sits at his desk looking grim, and the word “Soon…” appears before him. That is the end of the story.

And you know what’s weird? It’s drawn by Arthur fucking Adams, so it looks great. Adams is a nee plus ultra of monster drawing, and his Wendigos are incredibly detailed, scary and fluid. It’s kind of shocking that Marvel would hire Adams to draw one of their books, and then give him a script that everyone involved should be embarrassed to have their names attached to, and that he’d accept it. And then he’d proceed to draw the hell out of it.

The next story opens with Bruce Banner in Las Vegas suddenly, his escape or release from the prison in the last story not only unexplained but unmentioned, on the trail of the Red Hulk. He hears screams, and heads into a mythology-themed casino, and Adams draws this splash page:
Jesus, look at that. Look at the detail there…the differing expressions on the faces of the Cyclops statues, the care with which Adam lined up the slot machines, the little details like the arms of the dead hanging over the edges of the fountain, the number of panicked extras, the way the Wendigo on the far right casually tosses a slot machine with his right claw while reaching toward a terrified victim with his left.

This is a really nice splash page, made even nice still by the fact that too few artists even bother to draw enough to fill-up splash pages anymore. Later in the book, Frank Cho will squander double-page spreads on nothing more than a half-dozen characters posing in front of a blank background.

The entire Wendigos going ape-shit in Vegas storyline looks this great, by the way. The story isn’t just an insult to its readers, it’s a punch in their faces, but hell, Adams just about redeems it with his work.

How did this pack of Wendigos get to Vegas, which is, after all, quite a ways away from the frozen wastes of Canada? That goes unexplained too. Somehow they are in a Vegas casino, apparently passing Wendigo-ism on to their victims, and Bruce Banner, who is also somehow there, must stop them…which he attempts to do by randomly turning into the gray “Joe Fixit” version of the Hulk for some reason.

Then New York-based superhero Moon Knight randomly appears and starts fighting The Hulk. Then The Sentry and Ms. Marvel appear. Then the gray Hulk turns into the green hulk. Then he turns into this: It’s all completely random and aggressively, insultingly stupid, right up until the one and a half page appearance by Brother Voodoo, who simply magics everything back to normal, ending the storyline.

I did snicker at that Wendihulk splash, and, as I read it, I could kind of see what some people must find appealing about Loeb, beyond the fact that the brand of stupidity he writes is often so very funny. There’s certainly an appealing craziness to the Hulk just randomly becoming a Wendigo for a few pages, and calling himself the Wendihulk.

But were all these other pages really worth that one, single-image burst of zaniness? The rest of the story didn’t really have anything to offer aside from Adams’ always appealing line work.

More representative are pages like this—
—in which Loeb writes Moon Knight, Marvel’s off-brand Batman, and The Sentry, Marvel’s off-brand Superman, as if they were Batman and Superman, and even titled the story “World’s Finest,” just in case the gag weren’t obvious enough.

That’s the end of that storyline, and Arthur Adams’ involvement with the book. He’s replaced by another exceedingly talented artist, Frank Cho, and Loeb seems to have written a storyline specifically for Cho—it consists of nothing more than random Marvel superheroines fighting the Red Hulk, giving Cho the opportunity to draw just pages and pages of asses.

There’s an eight-page segment that recounts the Red Hulk vs. She-Hulk scene from the previous volume, this time from Shulkie’s point-of-view. It ends with the words “The Beginning…”

The next chapter finds She-Hulk calling superheroines from a list and trying to recruit them for an all-girl assault on the Red Hulk. Why is she only calling women? Well, because Cho likes drawing women. There’s no in-story reason given, because it’s not really a story…it’s just Cho drawing women, with Loeb writing terrible dialogue over the pictures.

The only two she can successfully recruit are Valkyrie and Thundra, shown here with SHIELD Deputy Director Maria Hill, who, it turns out, is actually a hobbit: After She-Hulk declares “Let’s go spank some red ass…” on a full-page splash, the trio track down the Red Hulk and engage in a violent battle full of gross dialogue. Then, just as the Hulk has them on the ropes, all the random heroines that all turned She-Hulk down earlier all appear.

Spider-Woman! Invisible Woman! She-Hulk! Tigra! Even Hellcat and Black Widow, who can’t possibly add anything! Why did Invisible Woman leave the rest of her rather powerful teammates to come alone? Because they’re boys, duh!

Here is some more actual dialogue that Jeph Loeb was paid to write:

"A waffle house of witches. Which one of you puts on the waitress uniform-- --and serves me? GOOD THING I BROUGHT MY APPETITE!"

They defeat the Hulk, and proceed to spend the night waiting for him to revert back to whoever he is when he’s not the Red Hulk. He never does, and eventually wakes up, grabs Thundra, jumps away with her, recruits her for something, and then the story ends.

It’s followed by one more, much shorter piece, “The Death and Life of The Abomination,” which is a recap of the Abomination’s fictional history, presented as a report from an unseen General Ross and illustrated by the great Herb Trimpe.

So the creative roster for this book? Jeph Loeb. Arthur Adams. Frank Cho. Herb Trimpe. One of those guys doesn’t seem to belong on that list, and the reason why isn’t simply that he’s not an artist.



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RELATED: Here’s a typical “look at all those asses” panel from Cho’s story:
I like the fact that Storm says she lost her phone. No wonder! Where would she put a cell phone? Did she try putting it in her pocket, forgetting that she wasn’t even wearing pants, and thus it just fell to the ground before she flew away?

Jeph Loeb really, really likes Terminator

Which is fine. It's no Predator or Empire Records or anything, but it's not a bad movie.

If you haven't completely blocked the experience out of your mind, you may recall that during the very painful Ultimates 3 Week here on EDILW, I noted that in Utlimates 3 #4 Jeph Loeb actually has a character appropriate a very famous line of dialogue from The Terminator for completely non-ironic usage. Which was particularly strange given that the character who used that line of dialogue was a Terminator-like killer robot disguised as a human being.

Matt Ampersand, who writes for The Weekly Crisis, was kind enough to send me a scan of the first page of the first issue of X-Man, which was apparently a mid-nineties X-book set in the "Age of Apocalypse" continuity and also written by Jeph Loeb.

How did Loeb open the book?
That is Age of Apocalypse-flavored Cyclops, his one eye glowing red, like the Terminator's.

Thanks for sharing, Matt!

Ultimates 3 #5

Previously in Ultimates 3: The team in the Savage Land joins forces with Ka-Zar, Shanna and their people to attack Magneto, Hank Pym rescues the Wasp from robots disguised as Iron Man and Captain America, Sabretooth and Hawkeye fight, Black Panther and Wolverine are attacked by the Juggernaut, Valkyrie is attacked by Mastermind and Pyro, Thor touches Unus the Untouchable only to be vanquished by Magneto, and Pym leads Wasp to the robotic villain living in their basement. (More here).

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So there’s been a lot of yelling and fighting sexing so far, but remember what the name of this story is? Er, yeah, it’s “Sex, Lies and DVD.” But remember what they changed the name to, for the purposes of the cover? Yes, that’s right, Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?.

It is time we find out, as our heroes Ant-Man and Wasp listen to the robot Yellowjacket record a report, which he addresses “to my creator Henry Pym.”

“You sought to provide androids to S.H.I.E.L.D. as a replacement for super soldiers," he says. "You called it Project Ultron.”

It’s true! He did! In Ultimates Vol. 2, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. This was when Pym was on the outs with the team for beating his wife and having ants attack her. Remember? He tried to give Fury some androids, and there was a scene where Scarlet Witch was talking to one, and Pietro was like, “Were you flirting with that machine?”

This was just a little Easter Egg type thing, since in normal Marvel Universe continuity, Wanda and android The Vision would fall in love, get married and I think maybe even have some magic kids or something…? It was so funny a joke, Millar re-used it at the end of the second volume, when Scarlet Witch asks an Ultron robot out on a date after they liberate America from the Liberators (on whose side Pym and the Ultrons fought

Or was it?

“Something happened to my original programming. Something…unexpected, Ultron/Yellowjacket says. “It was as if I were under some kind of spell. Improbable. Impossible. But…she was, after all…a witch.”

So Ultron fell in love with, and became obsessed with Wanda, even while he was demoted to a butler android in Ultimates Mansion. That’s right! There were androids serving drinks on the very first page!

It was Ultron who made and leaked the sex tape, and he created a Venom robot to capture the Scarlet Witch, which explains why Venom didn’t look like Ultimate Venom much.

There was some kind of flaw in Ultron’s design for his robot constructions though, so that when his robots were destroyed, they would melt. He knew Pym would notice, so Ultron drugged him. And then he used the time-honored trench coat and wide-brimmed hat disguise that Ben Grimm and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles use to walk unseen in New York City to trail Wanda and Pietro:

Not at all suspicious.

“It was a crime of passion,” Ultron says. “And no one suspected the butler did it.”

Considering that the murder weapon was a bullet programmed specifically to home in on Wanda’s D.N.A., and to also maybe be able to dodge or somehow compensate for possible super-speed interference from Quicksilver, that’s one well planned-out crime of passion.

On the fourth page of this explain-athon, Ultron talks about renaming himself Yellowjacket and to build robot versions of the Ultimates, and that his robot duplicates worked much better when he had live hosts to extract DNA from, which is why he has Tony Stark in a big basin of fluid.

Back in the Savage Land, Magneto is in the process of raining pink lightning on Shanna, Ka-Zar and their people, when Yellowjacket and his Ultimates attack. This seems contrary to his plan as he had previously announced it, to wait until Magneto and mutantkind’s war with humanity was over in order to claim earth for robotkind, but whatever, this book’s almost over, let’s just go with it.

Stowing away on Yellowjacket's shape is Tony “Iron Man” Stark, freed by the Wasp and Ant-Man, and wearing an all-black stealth suit which, we’ll see later, has War Machine-style gun shoulder-pad thingees.

“Elsewhere in The Savage Land,” Juggernaut is pounding on the Black Panther, whose costume is so torn up that now we can even see blond hair sticking out of his mask. Oh man, who is this guy?!

Juggernaut is about to say that “nothing can stop the Juggernaut” for like the third time in two issues, when all of a sudden he is impaled by the biggest fucking triceratops ever, and Wolverine, who is riding on it, quips, “Yeah, yeah, we know… last time I heard that one, I fell off my dinosaur.”

Wolverine is about to finish off Juggy—who apparently not even a triceratops in the gut can stop—when Black Panther catches Captain America’s shield (thrown by the about to arrive Iron Man) and then takes off his mask.

Oh my God! It’s Captain America! That’s why the two of them were never in the same place at the same time! (Except on covers). And that’s why Panther wouldn’t talk! And why Captain America was the only one who knew anything about Panther! And why Logan recognized the Panther even though he was disguised, because he could smell him!

Wasp is all, like, “You were the Black Panther? What the fuck, Captain America? That makes like no sense.”

And he says, “We’ll discuss it later, Jan.” This is a lie; it is not discussed later.

You may not remember, because I didn’t scan it or summarize it because there were so many crazy awful things happening that issue, but in the very first issue, Wasp asked Captain America why he didn’t respond when she called for him during the Venom attack episode, and he responded tersely that “I had to get a life of my own, Janet.”

See, he needed time away from The Ultimates, so, naturally, the best way to do this was to invent another identity so he could be an Ultimate in a different costume, or…yeah Captain America, that makes no fucking sense!

Back at the scene of Valkyrie’s attempted rape, Mastermind assures Pyro that his victims never wake up as he’s licking a crying, paralyzed Valkyrie’s face, when suddenly a mysterious figure appears in her hallucination about not being able to pay the rent. The figure explodes open the door behind which the landlord was just knocking, and says in a scratchy font, “I did not give you power so that you could die this day. We made a bargain. And you intend to keep it. Go now. Slay your enemies.”

Oh, so that’s why Valkyrie has powers now—she made a bargain with her landlord.

No, actually, it’s never revealed who the fuck this guy is. Wouldn’t want to tie up all the loose ends. Loeb might want to explore that in future issues of—oh yeah, this is the last issue of the series. Well, maybe in the next volume of the—oh, right, right. There is no next volume of the series. Huh.

Anyway, Valkyrie says “Men.” And then she chops off Mastermind’s head. And Pyro holds up his hands and tries to explain this wasn’t his idea, and she chops off both of his hands.

The Robo-Ultimates attack Magneto, causing him to lose his hold on Thor, whom he says he was holding “at the earth’s core.” Ultron informs Magneto that although he and his team are androids, there isn’t any metallic alloy on them. And then “KRAKA-THOOM” the real Thor appears holding his hammer, and he’s so pissed his back muscles are four times bigger than the last time we saw him.

Then the real Ultimates show up, Loeb walks away from his laptop, and a fourth-grade boy apparently climbs in an open window and scripts the dialogue for the next few pages.

Check this shit out:
Ha ha ha ha! Yellowjerk!

You know what we haven’t had this whole issue? A two-page splash!

Well, here’s one, featuring the two squads of Ultimates fighting. That’s followed by five panels checking in with each pair of combatants, in which terrible lines are spoken.

The Wolverine vs. Hulk panel is kind of amusing though. “I kinda wish you were the real Hulk. Me and him got unfinished business.” Wolverine says. This would have been published during Damon Lindeloff’s three-year break between issues of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk, see.

You know, Loeb may be a terrible, terrible comic book writer, and this may be the worst comic book every published by professionals (that I’ve read. I’ll try to follow up on some of your suggestions in the comments over the last few days). But at least he can write 22-pages of shitty comic every 30 days, and work in television simultaneously. It took Damon Lindeloff over three years to write about 132 pages of shitty comic (Well, the first half was pretty shitty; I gave up after the break, but it was basically just a fight comic. Lindeloff wasn’t writing From Hell or The Black Dossier or something requiring years of rigorous research).

Oh, wait, the dialogue gets worse than that last panel I scanned.

Yellowjacket tells Wasp that he’d rather not kill her, because “You’re almost like a mother to me.”

Ant-Man grows to human-size behind him, puts him in a headlock and says, "Then I guess that makes me--"
I…I don’t have words for this.

Okay, with Yellowjacket/Ultron’s head ripped off, the robots all collapse, and now it’s just Magneto staring down the Ultimates. While they’re talking, crazy old Hawkeye grabs a sharp piece of junk, shoves it into his crossbow gun, and shoots it at Magneto.

But, this:
Quicksilver takes it in the chest, saving his dad! He doesn’t use his super-speed to knock his dad out of the way, he doesn’t catch it, or put a piece of wood or rock or metal in front of it, he doesn’t even put a non-vital part of his body in front of it, he just uses his super-speed to get his chest in front of it.

Pietro is the world’s dumbest super-speedster.

As to why Magneto, using all his vaunted powers, couldn’t deflect the projectile, I wondered that myself upon the first reading, but there’s a pretty good chance that it was a piece of non-metal alloy taken from one of the destroyed Robo-Ultimates (The panel showing Hawkeye picking it up also features the robot Iron Man’s head on the ground next to it).

Magneto has now lost both of his kids to the Ultimates, and he’s so pissed that he uses his incredible powers that were unable to stop piece of plastic garbage shot out of a gun/cross-bow to lift his entire base up into the sky. Thor tires to give chase, but Magneto snatches his hammer from his hands and sends Thor hurtling to the earth below.

Here is Magneto, being very sad:
But what’s this? Pietro’s dead body is crying? Well then, obviously he’s not dead, right? Did Magneto not bother to take a pulse?

Well anyway, that’s the end of Ultimates 3 #5. We still don’t know who Valkyrie’s benefactor was, or where Pietro hid his sister’s body, or what’s up with his crying not-dead body, but hey, at least the question on the cover was answered. Ultron killed The Scarlet Witch.

Or wait, still one page to go…?
Oh yes, of course. It was Dr. Doom, a character who never appeared in the series at all, or was ever even mentioned in it, who was actually behind it all. That’s actually a pretty fitting end to this terrible, terrible comic book series.

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Next: There is no next, that’s the end! Thank God Loeb and Madureira didn’t actually do the 12 issues of this volume that was originally announced, huh? I know Loeb follows this up with Ultimatum, which is still ongoing, and thus unavailable to borrow from the library for a few months yet, but I suppose I’ll check that out when it is available. If anything has a chance of taking the Worst Comic Ever crown from Ultimates 3, Ultimatum sure seems like a contender.

Or maybe I’ll see about tracking down Ultimate Power, once I recover from this week.

Ultimates 3 #4

Previously in Ultimates 3: Wolverine flashbacked up the joint, explaining how this one time he had sex with Wanda and Pietro’s mom and then a jealous Magneto magnet-ed him down a mountain, then he explained how Wanda made all the dinosaurs in the Savage Land through magic to stop him from killing Pietro, and how he watched as Pietro and Wanda discover a kind of love that “no one in this room can really understand” (because it is incest), Wolverine and most of the team traveled to the Savage Land to recover Wanda’s body from Magneto and there they met Ultimate Ka-Zar, Ultimate Shanna and Ultimate Zabu, and, back in New York, Iron Man revealed himself to be a robot who captured The Wasp (More here).

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And now, the penultimate issue of Ultimates 3, and this one is all fight. Except for a dumb flashback. And some dumb robot shit. But there is a lot of fighting!

This one actually opens at a point in the past, a point so far back in the past that it’s colored black and white (It’s after the Wolverine-sexes-up-Magneto’s-girl flashback though, and that was in color, so who knows).

“Eight hundred miles off the coast of Australia. Years ago,” the gray caption box says, above a panel of a plane. Young, bald Charles Xavier is in the pilot’s chair, talking about this young mutant Aborigine he’s found to his pissed-off looking friend Eric, whose all “Who gives a shit about your dumb shit Xavier, all I care about is that my children find a home.”

His children are, of course, Pietro and Wanda, who are very little here. Wanda’s scared of flying, and just as Pietro’s promising that nothing will ever happen to her as long as he’s with her, the wing BOOMs off, and the plane crashes.

Assuming the plane was made out of metal, why didn’t Magneto just float it down safely? I don’t know. He does use his mastery of magnetism to dramatically clear some wreckage out of the way as they walk away from the crash.

Oh, and as the plane is going down, look who spots it:
Lil’ Ka-zar, Lil’ Shanna the Lil’ She-Devil, and darling little Lil’ Zabu.

Why he’s just a cub!

Hey, is Ka-Zar quoting Star Wars, or is that just a coincidence? Normally, I’d guess a coincidence, but given the dumb movie quote Jeph Loeb’s got coming up this issue, I can’t be sure.

When a big, tough guy dressed in animal skins and carrying a huge spear asks if Magneto and pals are okay and who are they anyway, Magneto makes the most evil expression he can and says “We come in peace…”

This is a story that Ka-Zar and Shanna, who are now grown-ups and in color, were telling the Ultimates. They plan to join them in their plans of kicking Magneto’s ass since, over the years, Magneto and his fellow evil mutants have slaughtered over half of K.Z.’s tribe, including his parents.

“Kazar. There’s more than just you and Shanna, right?” Valkyrie asks. “I mean, we need help, bit time.”

“Big time, Valkyrie says, and we see another dude with a torch, and a bunch of silhouettes in the background, indicating a crowd of guys with spears.

Back at the mansion, Iron Man, or the robot posing as him, holds Wasp by the throat and is talking about how the new world order will be better than the old world order, and, well, this:

Ugh. Did Jeph Loeb actually have a character un-ironically quote Terminator? In a story that’s about an evil robot?
Yes, yes he did.

Jesus.

And what’s worse, just as “Captain America” is leading Wasp away from the scene, lightning starts shooting out of his eyes and mouth, he shouts “SKEEEETTT” and Hank Pym, dressed in his Ant-Man costume and riding on a big, fat flying ant, flies out of “Cap”’s open mouth.

The character we thought was Captain America for three panels was actually a robot disguised as a human. Jeph Loeb had a robot-disguised-as-a-human un-ironically quote Terminator.

He melts into a puddle of green, viscous liquid because whatever.

“I need you to shrink down to wasp size and come with me,” Hank says to Wasp. “There’s a conspiracy -- it’s everywhere…”

Back in the Savage Land, Hawkeye is picking off Multiple Man’s multiple men, when Sabretooth jumps at him and shouts “I’m gonna rip your head clean off!”

It’s no “It’s clobberin’ time!” but then, Sabretooth is no Ben Grimm.

That’s when another genuinely cool, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-I-actually-thought-this-was-neat moment occurs—Ka-Zar’s sabretoothed tigers leap on Sabretooth and bury their claws and fangs into him. Sabretooth! Killed by sabretooths! That’s ironic!

(Well, I guess he actually survives, as Hawkeye "finishes him off" next issue, and I saw him ripping off Angel’s wings or something gross in last week’s Ultimatum #4, but as far as Ultimates 3 goes, this is pretty much the last we see of Sabretooth).

The only way this scene would have been cooler? If it was only one tiger—come on Zabu, you could have taken that punk solo—and if instead of Hawkeye getting saved, it was Captain America. And he replied, “You suck on that.”

Okay, maybe not cooler. But funnier!

(By the way, I should point out that as poor a comic book artist as Joe Madureira is, he’s much better suited to Loeb’s cartoonish ultraviolence than David Finch, the guy who’s drawing Ultimatum. This is probably because Madureira is a more cartoonish artists, and doesn’t do that ugly, little line-filled “realistic” style that Finch does. I mean, here we have two-thirds of a page devoted to two big tigers plunging claws and fants into a dude, and there’s not a speck of blood, no limbs flying off or exposed bones are intestines or anything. It’s extreme violence, but it’s relatively tasteful; Madureira apparently draws the split-second where the teeth and claws go in, rather than the split-second where the gushers of blood and shower of torn flesh would come out and off).

Meanwhile, stealthy, tracking-types with heightened senses Wolverine and “The Black Panther” are running through the Savage Land, when Ultimate Juggernaut, now the size of a small house, with hands a few feet wide, sneaks up on them and punches the shit out of them.

“@#$%!” Wolverine says, “The @#$%ing Juggernaut!?”

Ha ha ha ha ha! Like in that one Internet comedy video from many years ago!

The Juggernaut raises his fists to smash Black Panther and, is this the end of the mysterious Black Panther whose identity we don’t know but whose costume has been torn to reveal white skin beneath. White? Oh my God, what is his secret?!

We’ll have to wait until next issue to find out!

Elsewhere, Valkyrie is flying around on her pegasus, when a spurt of flame makes him say “REEEEEE” and throws her off. She wakes up in a messy bedroom, wearing her old “costume,” which was just a half-dozen pie tins, while an unseen landlord knocks on the door and asks for the rent.

She’s experiencing her “own private hell,” the mind-controlling Mastermind says. Late rent? A messy bedroom? Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And since this comics series just hasn’t been gross enough so far, we get this delightful scene:
Meanwhile Thor, Shanna and a bunch of random guys with spears are fighting an army of Multiple Man. Why did the rest of the Ultimates split-up Scooby-Doo style? I don’t know.

This brings us to the scene that Unus the Untouchable fans have been waiting for! Ultimate Unus the Untouchable vs. Ultimate Thor!

Sadly, he never refers to himself as “Unus the Untouchable.” He just stands in front of a rock wall and says, “This place is untouchable” while Thor’s hammer hits a force field in front of him.

“You stand against a god, Unus,” Thor says, and then he raises his hammer and, in the next panel, we get a close-up look at his face, which is contorted into the very angry Madureira expression, blood splatters all over him from off-panel and he says in a special yellow-colored dialogue bubble that Unus is but a mortal, “a thing of mere flesh and blood!”

The implication is that Thor totally smashed Unus the Untouchable with his hammer, but in the very next panel, Thor and his hammer are completely blood-free, and there’s no dead body anywhere. (Or maybe that’s Unus in the far right of the panel? There are some dark, grey shapes being flung around, and I assume they’re Multiple Man duplicates, but its unclear).

Anyway, Magneto strolls up and he and Thor exchange generic dialogue, while Magneto uses his power to drag Mjolnir down through the ground, with Thor still hanging on to it, being towed along with it.

Back in New York, in a subbasement ten stories below the mansion, Ant-Man and Wasp watch through a ventilation grate, as an unseen person puts the Iron Man robot back together, and talks about how the robots are so closely patterned after the Ultimates that their personalities assert themselves strongly (that’s why the Captain America robot tried to save Wasp from the Iron Man robot).

Then we get the dramatic last page splash!

“Hank!” Wasp says “He sounds just like you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Ant-Man replies, “He’s our son…!”

And on the last page, we see that the figure is Yellowjacket! Wearing a costume almost identical to the one that Marvel Universe Hank Pym wore when he was going by the name Yellowjacket, only with smaller shoulder pad wings and without the yellow bug symbol on the chest.

This Yellowjacket is surrounded by four others, the Iron Man, an Ultimate Thor that actually looks like Brian Hitch’s Ultimate Thor (Shorter hair and beard, slimmer build, the big half-axe Mjolnir), an Ultimate Hulk, and an Ultimate Captain America who’s wearing the uniform from World War II.

Here’s the dramatic monologue: “They think of us as toasters -- --alarm clocks -- --and vibrators. But when the war between man and mutant is settled-- --and most of the human population is dead, only then will they realize-- --the MACHINES have already won.”

Holy shit, a machine whose all “Rah rah robots rule!” that Hank Pym says is his son! Who is this mysterious new villain?! If you’ve ever read an Avengers comic, you probably already know. If not, you’ll have to wait until the next issue to find out.

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Tomorrow night: This is it! The ultimate issue of Ultimates 3! Who will live? Who will die? Who will utter the worst dialogue? Can a human being write over 10,000 words about Ultimates 3 in just five days and still retain their sanity?! Find out tomorrow night!

Ultimates 3 #3

Previously in Ultimates 3: Hawkeye fought Spider-Man in Central Park for seven pages and then stopped, Hank Pym is unconscious at Ultimates Mansion having consumed an unknown quantity of unknown pills, Quicksilver brought his murdered sister Scarlet Witch’s body back to base, Magneto and his mutant terrorist organization The Brotherhood attacked in order to recover the body of his daughter Scarlet Witch, Sabretooth told Captain America to suck it, Wasp begins to think all of the team’s recent misfortunes might be connected, Quicksilver evacuates the Brotherhood at super-speed and absconds with his sister’s body, and then Wolverine shows up and threatens everybody for no reason. (You can read the 2,000-word version here).

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Welcome to Ultimates 3 #3! This issue has my favorite cover so far: Naked Wolverine having the bottom half of his body chomped by a Tyrannosaur. I wouldn’t mind having a huge version of that in a really nice frame over my mantle. The variant cover is by Frank Cho, and it makes Scarlet Witch’s costume look extremely uncomfortable. My nipples and nether region hurt just looking at it. (What, too much information?)

According to the confounding dateline captions, this issue opens at the Tony Stark’s mansion, which is still located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it takes place “last night.” You’ll recall the second issue ended “two seconds ago.” I think the narrative is actually traveling back n time…? Perhaps that’s why there’s a dinosaur on the cover? I guess we’ll find out soon.

So, the previous issue ended with Wolverine popping his claws with a SNIKT and telling the Ultimates they have a bigger problem. It turns out he was threatening them with violence after all, he was just saying hello.

Here he scowls and raises his claws, summarizing the events of the last two issues.

“And before her body is even cold, The Brotherhood-- led by Magneto himself--conveniently shows up here, hands you your collective asses and makes off with the evidence… And none of you want to ask why?”

Er, I know this is nitpicking, but they all have their own individual asses. A collective ass would surely be singular, right? A bigger concern is that everything that Wolverine described happening, from the shooting through Magneto’s attack, happened in within fifteen minutes. News travels fast I guess; fast enough for Magneto and the Brotherhood to have heard about it and arrived to attack, and for Wolverine to have heard about it and dropped by. Maybe they were all in the neighborhood.

(Is it worth noting that Joe Madureira seems to be drawing Marvel Universe Wolverine, rather than Ultimate Universe Wolverine? The Ultimate version had long, more human hair than the weird mane/hair helmet of the original, and had a stupid little soul patch. Maybe later artists on Ultimate X-Men started drawing Ultimate Wolvie more like Original Recipe Wolvie, but there will be some scenes set around the time of the first few issues of Ultimate X-Men later in which Wolverine is sans soul-patch and looks like the stocky little monster troll of the Marvel Universe, instead of the younger, sexier Ultimate version.)

Wolvie says Pietro/Quicksilver called his father Magneto, but Hawkeye disagrees:
Wow, that’s pretty mean, Wolverine.

How does Hawkeye react to Wolverine flippantly bringing up the murder of his family?

By shooting Wolverine five times in a two-page spread, shouting, “That is, mutie, you wanna go, let’s go!”

Wolverine doesn’t like being called “mutie,” as that is apparently a very bad slur to call a mutant, maybe the mutant equivalent of the K-word for Jewish folks or the N-word for black folks?

His eyes turn red, and he shouts “ ‘MUTIE’!?! Oh, I’m gonna DIG this, Barton,” while cutting off half of Hawkeye’s stupid mask.

He retracts his claws when Hawkeye says “I’m better off dead anyway.”



This brings me to one of the parts of the series I genuinely thought was kind of cool, along with the KARAKKAKATHOOM sound effect for Thor in the first issue, and the fact that artist Madureira actually drew Sabretooth with outsized teeth on the cover of the second issue, thus justifying his name…a little (I never understood why Sabretooth was called Sabretooth, since he just had slightly pointy teeth and fought with his fingernails anyway).
So look, neat swearing!

Yeah, it’s still that childish “I’d like to say ‘fuck,’ but since this comic actually kinda sorta for kids even though we say comics aren’t for kids and its full of incest and violence anyway, we have to use four symbols to stand in for the F, the U, the C and the K, even though anyone who’s ever heard a swear word before can deduce from the context that we mean ‘fuck” stuff, these are at least some creative symbols. Kinda like Bettle Bailey swearing, when Whover Draws That Series Know draws little storm clouds and skulls into Sarge’s swearing. Here, the F-word contains a tornado, a radioactive symbol and a skull and cross bones. That’s kinda neat.

Thor doesn’t think so though. He’s had “ENOUGH!” of this shit, and will brook no further fighting amongst the Ultimates.

Wolverine huffs and puffs a bit more about “Pietro and Wanda Lensherr” (shit, I thought there last name was Maximoff? Maybe it’s different in the Ultimate Universe?). When Wasp is all like, “Er, not that we aren’t glad you’re here to help boost sales, why do you give a shit?”

Wolverine explains that, “We’re not talking about just any girl here. We’re talking about Magneto’s daughter. And she could’ve been mine.”

What’s that? Perhaps a Wolverine-narrated flashback will help explain!

It’s “after the war”—I’m guessing the Gulf War—and he’s wandering through the Balkan Mountains in the harsh winter, looking for Wundagore, which means something if you’re familiar with the Marvel Universe (Has Wundagore appeared in any Ultimate books?). He collapses—healing factor on the fritz?—and is found by Magda, Wanda and Pietro’s mother.

See, Wolverine was looking for the Witch of Wundagore, hoping she could help him end his immortal life. Instead, he finds himself naked in her bed, with her standing naked in front of the fire. And then they totally do it. In silhouette, of course, because remember, this is for teenage boys, because what other audience wants to read about Wolverine fucking Scarlet Witch’s mom, but also can’t be permitted to see actual nudity?

(There’s a close-up scan. I didn’t scan it myself, but just found it when google image-ing to see if I could find a scan of the two-page spreads. It’s from a review of this very issue by James Hunt, which you can find here. It’s well worth a read, as Hunt seems to have noticed a whole bunch of little continuity glitches I didn’t, like the number of Hawkeye’s dead children, and the state of Wolverine’s memory during the flashbacks. The Ultimate Universe was only about seven years old at the point this book was published; there really wasn’t much continuity for Loeb and his four editors to have to get right).

That’s when Eric Lensherr, who would one day be Magneto, walks in and finds his wife/girlfriend/lover/whatever in bed with a naked Wolverine. Magneto powers up and then throws a big cauldron at Wolverine, throwing him naked down the mountain.

“I’d been cast down out of heaven…” he says, “…Only to learn that I could not find Wundagore ever again.”

Flash forward to The Savage Land, when Wolverine was working for Magneto (as seen in the first arc of Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men). Wolvie recognizes Scarlet Witch as Magda’s daughter.

Magneto orders Wolverine to track Wanda and Pietro when they go exploring in the jungle, and kill Pietro.

Pietro clasps his sister’s hand and tells her she looks more like their mother every day (Ew), and Wolverine says he “wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t…interrupted.” (Ew). He sticks his claws in Pietro’s chest (although he narrates that he wasn’t trying to actually kill him, just spook him enough to get him to leave his father), but then TWO-PAGE SPLASH!
Wanda glows pink and the background fills with glowing eyed dinosaurs. Apparently, it was Wanda who filled the Savage Land with dinosaurs, as she was able to bend time in space and rearrange reality; Magneto simply took credit for it. A T-Rex chases Wolverine away.

Once they think they’re alone, well, I guess they start doing it, and Wolverine watches…
So yeah, ew.

Wasp splits up the team, sending half after Magneto in the Savage Land, and keeping the rest with her. Thor, Valkyrie, Wolverine and The Black Panther are the Savage Land team, and when Wasp sees BP, she asks where he’s been and where Captain America is. He doesn’t answer, and Wolverine takes one look at the Panther and asks incredulously if “that’s the Black Panther.” Oh my God, have you figured out his secret yet?

If not, a few pages later, Wolverine let’s the Panther know he knows his identity and he can’t figure out why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Back in New York, Iron Man tells The Wasp he examined the crime scene and discovered that the bullet used to kill Scarlet Witch was a D.N.A.-specific one and was manufactured by Stark Industries. And then he removes his faceplate to reveal…a robot face underneath? And then he hits Wasp with a bolt of electricity!

The Ultimates’ transport lands safely in the Savage Land—hey, I thought people always crash-landed when they visited the Savage Land?—and meet Wolverine’s contacts there, who get introduced in a last-page splash.


There are two admittedly rather cool looking sabretooth tigers, and posed between them are two mostly naked figures.

“I’m Shanna and this is my boyfriend Ka-Zar,” the female says. Sweet, it’s Ultimate Shanna the She-Devil and Ultimate Ka-Zar! And, while it doesn’t say so, I assume the sabretooth he’s leaning on is Ultimate Zabu. How does he differ from "616" Zabu? He's striped. Bad-ass.

And that’s the third issue. We’ve passed the halfway mark!

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Tomorrow night: The Ultimates vs. The Brotherhood! Another genuinely cool scene! An attempted rape scene, demonstrating that this is all very serious and adult! And Ultimate Unus the Untouchable! And don’t forget to come back in a few hours for this week’s Weekly Haul