“In the early years of the 21st Century, America and the world reeled in horror in response to a vicious, unwarranted attack to some of the country’s most cherished institutions. I refer of course to Marvel Comics miniseries Ultimatum …” – Introduction to the Jeph Loeb chapter of Lloyd DeGroot’s “They Really Mean It: America’s War on Subtext”
I’m pretty sure it was during the scene where Batman and Black Canary have sex in costume after mercilessly beating the living shit out of a bunch of thugs that my mind broke. In that moment of epiphany, I recognized All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for what it was. And I knew, with a cosmic certainty, that my prior view of the series, informed as it was by the quaint notion that mainstream superhero comic books were vehicles for stories, was based on a faulty premise.
Frank Miller wasn’t writing a story in ASBARTBW, I realized. He was making a joke, making it quite literally at the expense of DC and the book’s readers. The joke starts like this: Frank Miller, creator of The Dark Knight Returns, walks into a bar and–no, sorry, that was what happened prior to the ’06 Eisner Awards. Bugger. I’m terrible at telling jokes, but the point of this one was for Frank Miller to see just how far he could go, how many lines he could cross using one of North America’s best-known comic book characters, before someone made him stop.
“OK, first up I want the first issue to feature a serious reporter lounging around in lingerie and high heels, and there’s got to be at least one ass-shot. Also, Batman’s going to abuse Dick Grayson. Is that all right…? Yeah? How about Batman and the Canary having on-panel sex in costume? No problem, huh…? OK, I want Batman and everyone else in the book to not call him Batman, in this book, he’s the God-damn Batman (and he’s got the superpower to grow a beard inside five minutes.) Really, I can do that? Hmmm… Well how about this: I insist that you actually print the four-letter words I write and then put black bars over them, rather than just printing black bars, so that I’ll be the first writer ever to get the c-word printed in a Batman comic… ‘Sure thing, Frank’? Wow. Times have changed. OK… in #12, I want a full-on orgy between Batman, Black Canary, Batgirl, Robin, Ace the Bat-hound and , what the hell, let’s throw Commissioner Gordon in there wearing a dress…”
I bet DC would let him do it, too, as long as it stayed in the top ten. Anyway, it’s clear to me now that it’s all a joke, one that, like the comedy of Andy Kaufman, is probably funnier to think about than to actually experience. Fortunately for the sanity of people that actually care about the wellbeing of 40 to 70-year old corporate trademarks, Miller seems to have gotten bored with the whole thing and moved onto doing comic and/or film sequels to 300 and Sin City, presumably in the hopes that one or the other will help people forget what he did to The Spirit.
On the surface, Marvel’s Ultimatum has many similarities to All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder: it wallows in excess; it features well-known characters acting wildly out of character; both have artists that want to be Jim Lee. But while it would be nice to think that Ultimatum, like ASBARTBW, is an elaborate joke, I… can’t. I mean, I could, and I started writing a post that treated it as such (it was going to feature the “Ultimatum Truth Movement”, full of people with wildly differing conspiracy theories regarding why the series was so bad and who was secretly responsible.)1 But that post wasn’t coming together, and in kicking it around, I gave way too much thought to Ultimatum, and god help me, I think I actually started to understand it, at least a little…
Ultimatum poses a variety of questions for its readers:
-Which tastes better: Blob or Wasp?
-Was Ultimate Magneto always a total pussy?
-When did Jeph Loeb start doing crystal meth?
-Did they just–? They couldn’t, could they? I mean, what the fuck…?”
It even forces the reader to ask some serious questions, most of them variations of “How could this happen?”
Remember when people were afraid Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada were going to close down the “616” Marvel Universe and make the more modern, less continuity-laden Ultimate line the “official versions” of the characters? That was a good idea, what happened to that? It seems like, somewhere along the way, it was decided that the one thing that would make Ultimate-style stories better was decades of convoluted backstory. Instead of shuttering the Marvel Universe after Civil War (which ended on exactly the kind of upbeat note that a major superhero-centric continuity should end on)2 , everything in the Marvel Universe got Ultimatized.
Meanwhile, the Ultimate Universe was increasingly watered down. A creative brain-drain saw Ultimate U creators put to work on 616 Marvel titles and/or hired away from the company. Writers other than Ultimate architects Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar added a bunch of stuff to the mythos, some of which was interesting, most of which was unnecessary, all of which made the whole endeavour more convoluted and less welcoming to new readers.3
Eventually, all the hot creators (Bendis notwithstanding) were working elsewhere, while the Ultimate Line was left to guys like Robert Kirkman and Mike Carey (rock-solid talents, the both of them, but outside of Walking Dead and {knock on wood} The Unwritten, writers that didn’t have the kind of fanbase of a Bendis or a Millar and frankly weren’t going to get them, as Bendis and Millar largely did, based on their Ultimate contributions.)
Eventually, someone at Marvel likely noticed that the original versions of the company’s franchises were selling better than the Ultimate ones, and probably started wondering what the point of the Ultimate Universe was. The obvious answer was, “It’s a place that Bendis can write Spider-Man as a high school kid, which he seems to enjoy.” Nice for Bendis, but it’s not much of a raison d’etre for an entire imprint.
They could’ve shut things down then, or mostly shut them down, letting Bendis continue to do that thing he does so well on Ultimate Spider-Man. Or they could’ve kept the line going as it was, until it stopped being worth it at all. Instead, they decided to try and resuscitate the Ultimate books by making them even more Ultimate.
I am not without sympathy for Jeph Loeb. He had a thankless task, trying to find a way to differentiate the Ultimate Universe from its Marvel counterpart after that counterpart had co-opted most of the Ultimate line’s positive aspects. Loeb was ready to take things to the next level, but all that was left to take there were elements that, uh, maybe weren’t so good.
That didn’t stop them from getting taken to the next level anyway. Mark Millar’s Ultimates was a Michael Bay film in comic book form. Jeph Loeb’s Ultimate output apparently took its cues from Eli Roth.
It’s easy to get snarky about Ultimatum’s descent into depths of superhero decadence previously unexplored in a mainstream capes ‘n’ tights comic. So I have, because I like doing easy things. But I believe a critic who’s looking for something more than a punchline has to consider what the intent behind a given piece was, and base their criticism on how successful the creators were in achieving their goals. Looking at the big picture, assuming Loeb was tasked with taking the Ultimate line and doing something that could only be done there, something that would get a lot of attention… in that context, I can see where the arbitrary wholesale murder of numerous major characters might not automatically register as the apocalyptically bad idea it obviously is in retrospect.
That said, most ideas, even great ones, can’t carry a story on their own. Even giving Marvel and co. the benefit of the thematic doubt, when it came to execution, for whatever reason, Ultimatum was a swing and a miss. I’m just not sure it wasn’t a swing worth taking under the circumstances, or how much it actually missed by.
So what happens now? Obviously, just ending the Ultimate Comics imprint is a non-starter. If Marvel’s going to do multiple Noir books, there’s no way they’re letting something as once-popular as the Ultimate U go. So: do they embrace the New Direction of the Ultimate line? Do they try something altogether new and different? Or do they do they fall back on the creators who made the line a success in the first place while trying to distance the line from Ultimatum by making “Ultimate” branding as unobtrusive as possible without eliminating it altogether?
Yeah, if I were them I wouldn’t be trying new and different right now, either.
-Foley
- Dan Didio figured prominently, as the brilliant puppetmaster who activated DC’s secret sleeper agent, Joe Quesada.
- Which isn’t to suggest Civil War itself didn’t have a very Ultimate line philosophy underpinning it, or even that it was a particularly good story. All I’m saying for the moment is that it would’ve been a decent place to stop telling a fifty-year long story and concentrate on stories that didn’t revolve around which cafe Peter Parker hung out at in the sixties. Or his wife.
- Bendis himself didn’t help things when he rushed headlong into Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, then reversed course and decided some, most, or all of it never happened–I’m not entirely clear on that myself…