Ultimate Marvel, Part 1

I've been binge reading Marvel's Ultimate books recently, and I am about to enter the Miles Morales era. I thought this would be a good time to take a break and reflect on the characters and events of the Ultimate Universe. Spoilers ensue.

First, I feel like the writers of this line have been trying to see just how much they can get away with. They put themselves in our shoes, and they figure out what lines we think they would never cross, and then they cross them. Ultimatum is a prime example of that, though perhaps not the best one. The best example is probably the death of Spider-Man and the rebirth of Spider-Man.

The earliest examples of lines being crossed, however, involved the Ultimates and Ultimate X-Men. The Ultimates featured characters that were not very likable. Their shortcomings were very much front-and-center. But these were the guys who were needed to solve our problems, so that's the kind of hero we wound up with. Captain America and Hulk probably suffered the most for this. They made the abusive and unstable Hank Pym look sympathetic in comparison. Cap said a number of things that I just didn't like, a lot of it coming from judgmental attitude of patriotism. Hulk ate people. This was pretty jarring. This was superheroes without the purity and virtue. These were superheroes who didn't always feel like they were the good guys. But there were signs of the Ultimate Universe leaning in this direction since Ultimate X-Men, in which Wolverine left Cyclops for dead at one point.

Despite all this, the Ultimate Universe was still building something. At least, they were until Jeph Loeb got his hands on it. With Ultimatum, Jeph Loeb crossed almost every other line we thought Marvel would never cross. Iconic characters died. Mutants were revealed to be manmade rather than a product of evolution (as revealed earlier in Ultimate Origins by Bendis). The living were thrust into unfamiliar territory. Reed Richards turned villain. Young troubled heroes moved in with Spider-Man. Mutants were labeled as terrorists. In short, the writers were truly freed up to take the books in new directions that could not happen in the mainstream Marvel Universe.

I have many problems with Ultimatum. I think it crossed too many lines at once, and it wasn't as subtle as previous lines. Even the Hulk eating people was subtle in comparison. When so many lines are being crossed all at once, it feels more like the events are being played for shock value than for organic storytelling. The deaths of Professor X, Wolverine, and Magneto did not feel like earned moments. It felt like their stories came to an abrupt and unceremonious end. This might reflect the harshness of the real world, but it's not something I want in a story. It doesn't make sense for a story. In short, Ultimatum was a huge table-flip to the status quo. Some good things came out of this new status quo, but I'm convinced there had to be a better way to reach this point, even if it meant doing it gradually over several more months or a year.

Several of the Ultimate books are like strange footnotes. Orson Scott Card's Ultimate Iron Man didn't seem to fit in anywhere--until another writer decided that his books were a "Saturday Morning Cartoon" version of that world's Iron Man. Then it all made sense. The Ultimate Avengers books were hit or miss, and I strongly dislike the role they played in the death of Spider-Man, mostly because it didn't feel (there's that word again) organic. It also pissed me off that Spidey took a fatal gunshot wound from a shot that was only intended to take out Cap's kneecaps. It makes his death seem senseless. But, well, there's a lot of senselessness in the Ultimate books. This is not a safe comic book world where everything turns out okay. But I wonder if it could have been done better.

Spidey has proven to be the heart, soul, and conscience of the Ultimate Universe. As far as I'm concerned, this is Bendis's world. He was the one who made it work. It was other writers who decided to let character flaws overtake heroism. (And as I type this, I recall that he was the one who made Reed turn villain.) Specifically, his work on Ultimate Spider-Man is what made reading these books worthwhile, even the ones knee-deep in blood and compromise. His books had characters who loved each other and tried to do right by one another. These elements were so very necessary, and yet so very lacking in the Ultimates and Ultimate Avengers. These characters feel deadened by the amount of death they deal with. If Ultimatum had been truer to Spidey's spirit, it would have worked in at least a few moments like the ones in Spidey's book. The Ultimates need a hug or something.

This has taught me something about telling a story. If you want a character's decisions to have stakes (real stakes, not fabricated end-of-the-world stakes), then they need people in their lives that they love. It's like the old gag, where some random character shows us a picture of his family before being unceremoniously killed. It's a cheap way to make us care a little bit, though savvy audiences will recognize it as a death flag. But there was some truth to it. A character's world has to be populated with people and things that he cares about and wants to protect. For Spidey, this has been made clear numerous times. But for the Ultimates, as near as I can tell, all they want in life is to kill bad people. True heroes.

I'm kind of glad that the Ultimate Universe eventually came to an end. That world was too cruel for a gem like Spider-Man.

Thought Twists: Watchmen

Spoilers for a 30+ year old story.

I can't remember when I read Watchmen for the first time. Over a decade ago, easily. I might have been in college, which makes it over 15 years ago. Regardless, I thought it was time to reread it since a move came out a little while back, since DC's next event hinges on these characters, and since sensibilities change.

You see, I didn't like it very much. I found it largely boring back then. And my knowledge of comics wasn't developed enough to even appreciate it on a technical level. So I was curious what I would think of it after all these years.

Turns out it's a better book than I remember, but I still didn't like it.

Story

Watchmen is more about the world they inhabit than about the characters. A kind of foreboding tone permeates almost every element of the book. There are some moments of wonder, but they are brief. Characters that I found most intriguing sometimes disappeared for a few issues at a time. There are also many detours from the plot, as the story takes time to show us "lesser" characters. One character in particular is reading a pirate comic (a comic within a comic, before it was cool to be meta), and we actually do manage to meet the writer and are treated to some faux-print media that spills details about the history of the aforementioned pirate comic. Another character has a transformative experience after attempting to psychoanalyze the fiercely willful Rorschach. 

This is not a superhero story. Perhaps it was misleading in that regard. There are costumed adventurers in various states of either retirement or denial. They turn out to be easily manipulated or dysfunctional in some way. They are also largely ineffectual. By the end of the journey, you're not entirely sure what it was all for. The story gave us a tour of a world on the brink, and the extreme lengths a certain character employed to bring us back from it. Or, if not to bring us back from it, then to carry us through the baptism by fire to other side.

Largely, it was not an exciting story. It was interesting, though. It had many different points of view, many motivations. In certain ways, it reminds me of Lord of the Rings, for which the author had more interest in describing landscapes and sharing poetry than in crafting a pulse-pounding action sequence. Tolkien wanted to teach us about the world he created, while Alan Moore wanted to teach us something about the world we created. And from that, we can only conclude that no superhero following in the noble footsteps of DC and Marvel characters really has a role to play. In our world, the only one who can save us is Lex Luthor.

Tone

The inhabitants of this world live from day to day with the possibility of nuclear war. This is a world struggling to keep hope alive, and it's not looking good. Ozymandias sacrifices half the population of New York in order to prevent war with Russia. Does the fact that it actually works mean it was the right thing to do?

When I think about the issues affecting the regular people of the story, I think about the day-to-day issues that affect us. Racism. Sexism. Guns. A joke of a political campaign that stopped being funny very quickly. You can't even talk about comic books or video games without some kind of controversy errupting. Escapism is no longer fun; it's just another issue that needs to be fixed. It's just another thing that oppresses the less privileged.

Seeing conversations unfold on Twitter, in which nobody is really communicating anything to the other party, makes me feel just as helpless as the people of Watchmen must have felt. To have so many mass shootings, yet to be unable to make any progress in the conversation about guns... It makes me feel like we are getting nowhere. It makes me feel like this is where the train stops, and this is where we wait for the end.

There are no endings, of course. There is always an "after" after. When humanity reaches a wall, they usually find a way to knock it down. But it's never bloodless. There is always a price. Ozymandias saw that we needed change, and he decided that violence and death were necessary to make it happen. When change truly happens in this country, it will have to be more unstoppable than the forces maintaining the status quo are immovable. And it's not going to be pretty. But then, the world is already not a pretty place. What exactly would we be destroying as we move forward to a (hopefully) better world? Would it be worth it? Does it even matter what we destroy, as long as we can build something a little bit better? Was this country not built on a mountain of corpses?

I wonder if there wasn't some Buddhist influence in the conclusion of the book. Dr. Manhattan's peculiar sense of scale contributed to this, and so did Nite Owl's and Silk Spectre's reaction to the atrocity committed by Ozymandias. Certain events are too large, above our pay grade. We can only accept them and move on.

Like I said, this is not a superhero story. About the only thing this has in common with such a story is that it is ultimately about hope. Your typical superhero story is about the abundance of hope, and Watchmen is about the absence of it. How do you save a world that is on the verge of giving up?

Design

Though I didn't find the book very enjoyable either time I read it, I did appreciate its technical qualities this time around. I like how there was typically more than one action being performed in a single panel. I like that when a character says, "I noticed your calendar earlier," you can actually flip back a page and see him noticing it, even though it is not obvious. I like that references to print media given casual mention in the midst of the story are fleshed out in the back matter, even though I loathed reading the back matter. This story and its world were incredibly well thought out.

However, some of these design elements really wreaked havoc on the flow of the story. Nothing slows you down more than having to keep two parallel, simultaneous stories in your head while you're reading. There's some real intense overlapping going on throughout, with the pirate comic and with narrative captions that originate from moments that are separate from the one you're witnessing. It was a terrific experiment, though I'm almost positive someone must have improved upon this format in the decades since it was published. Perhaps the wordiness was the issue for me.

Themes

I've already talked a bit about themes, but luckily there is no shortage of them in Watchmen. One particularly interesting moment was when Ozymandias was studying his hall of monitors and drawing conclusions about our collective mindset. For instance, since people were anxious about war with the Russians, escapism (including both lighthearted adventure and eroticism) grew more popular. I can't help but to turn the lens onto us. We grow enraged when Captain America is revealed to be a Hydra agent. We send death threats to the writer. Meanwhile, people are dying--real people. Unjustly. Is this where our priorities lie? People will fight to protect their escapism, but they won't fight for true justice. True heroes.

They'll scream about justice. But once they've vented, they'll go back to blogging about Watchm--I mean, they'll go back to watching TV or whatever, convinced that they've done something. Convinced that they've contributed. I honestly don't know how important it is to merely participate in the conversation without following it up with action. My own sense of scale is off balance. I can retweet as many feminist articles as I like, but that doesn't make me an ally. You're not an ally until you help someone. Until you do something. And talking? That's just talk. I can't think of a single person whose mind I changed by the power of Words. That's because most people have already made up their mind. When they are ready to be more receptive, they'll be able to find the answers they need just about anywhere. They don't need me. Nobody needs to hear me talk. (hashtag: "selfpity")

What the world needs is more people who will do something. Someone who is willing to bleed to do the right thing. There's your ally. But I'm not that. I'm not that good. All I have are powerless, impotent words, and only just enough knowledge to hide my unfathomable ignorance--without success.

When I am done here, lamenting the state of the world and its snail's pace toward progress, I won't be helping anyone. I will instead be escaping into a story that allows me to pretend that good triumphs over evil. Because good is better. Because hope is powerful. Because someone will save us. Because someone is fighting for Tomorrow.

You know. Kid stuff.