So people sometimes get on me for being too critical. “You critic,” they say, “you don’t like anything and you hate all things and your soul is a black void, incapable of feeling joy.” And this is just not true! For example, I love funnel cake. Funnel cake is delicious, especially with whipped cream and strawberries.
Ultimate Fantastic Four is not funnel cake, but it is intellectually delicious in its own way. For those not in tune with the comics world, Ultimate Fantastic Four is a Fantastic Four comic set in the Ultimate version of the Marvel universe, which is supposedly like the regular Marvel universe except with all the baggage the original versions of the characters have with them, so the characters can have all-new adventures and be written about in fresh new ways.
In theory, anyway, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In reality, the Ultimate line has mostly been an excuse for pastiche stories of varying levels of quality, one step removed from bad issues of What If. “Hey, let’s do the Galactus story, except this time Galactus is a giant swarm of metal bugs and crap, and the Fantastic Four teams up with the Avengers! Excuse me, the Ultimates. My bad.” And that was one of the better Ultimate pastiche stories. You can’t go two issues without seeing Ultimate Whoever show up. It’s gotten so bad that when Robert Kirkman devoted most of an Ultimate X-Men arc to a new character called Magician, people kept wondering if he was the Ultimate Phoenix Force or the Ultimate Cosmic Cube or what have you. (In reality, he was just a mediocre demigod-type character, but at least Kirkman tried something new.)
Which is why Ultimate Fantastic Four is such a pleasure, because while Mike Carey’s run on the title is producing less glorious sales than Mark Millar’s run (wherein the latter had the dual advantage of fanboys needing to beat off to their monthly dose of Greg Land porn tracing and the amusing if pretty goddamned shameless tactic of the Marvel Zombieverse), Carey is writing high-gloss space opera with only the barest of nods to the fact that this is traditionally a Marvel comic book. Yes, he’s introduced Ultimate Thanos and Ultimate Ronan the Accuser and Ultimate Silver Surfer and Ultimate Psycho-Man; the point is that he’s doing these things the right way, by using the names as starting points and then doing whatever the fuck he wants with them.
Mike Carey understands: all you really need to take away from a new version of Thanos is that when he first shows up, he’ll be a bad guy. You don’t need to worry about all the crap Thanos comes with in his original version, because so what, it’s a new comic and that means new rules. And Mike Carey is really, really good at inventing new rules. And this works to great effect, because at heart, the Fantastic Four are explorers and adventurers, and that means they should be dealing with the new and unexpected on a constant basis – but for a very long time we’ve grown used to seeing the Fantastic Four doing the same old thing – fights with Dr. Doom and the Frightful Four and Galactus. (Even the Waid/Weiringo F4, probably the best, most fun run on the title in the last twenty-five years, had all three of those old saws, and at length to boot.)
But Mike Carey is throwing tesseract worlds and weird homages to the Forever People and artificial alien civilizations at us in every issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four, and it is glorious. And nobody really talks about Ultimate Fantastic Four, so I felt I should fill the gap.
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Why the hell is it so goddamn hard to get proper collections of Doonesbury? Is this a deliberate decision by Garry Trudeau or what? Doonesbury is one of the most important comic strips of the last thirty years (I don’t see a whole lot of other comic strips winning Pulitzers), and the best thing about it is that it works in continuous narrative in a way that other “storytelling” strips like godawful Mary Worth and the like could only dream about. Really, the layers of story you get when you read years of Doonesbury at a time is almost unparalleled in comic strips, or even longer-form works for that matter. And unlike most long-running strips, Doonesbury has never gotten bad. The single weakest period of the strip (probably 1987-1989) was still reasonably good, and thirty years later, Trudeau still manages killer punchlines on a very regular basis.
(I admit that I’m writing this at a time when he’s trying an “Obama as the first black Kennedy” series of gags that just kind of sucks, but believe me, the Bezerkistan saga and Toggle’s accident in Iraq more than made up for it.)
So why is it such a pain in the ass for me to get that uninterrupted narrative in book form? Why is there no Fantagraphics collection of The Essential Doonesbury? No, instead we get the endless series of big, flat books, which waste page space on empty white and gray. (Seriously: the recent collections have three daily strips per page, on page stock that previously was used for four strips. These aren’t fucking paintings, Trudeau. Use the entire page.) If you want to save some bones or shelf space or both, and buy the larger collections, they inevitably leave out about a third of the strips or even more.
Now I know someone’s going to point out that The Bundled Doonesbury has the entire series up till about 1998 on a single CD-ROM. My counterargument is that I don’t want to read the strip on a CD-ROM. Especially that one, which has a slow, clunky interface one would have associated with, say, the mid-1990s Encarta offerings from Microsoft, except worse in every possible way.
I want a frigging big-ass completist series of hardcover books of Doonesbury, and I can’t believe I’m alone in this. So someone go get Fantagraphics on this, stat!
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Over/under on Final Crisis sucking currently determined by who the villain is. If you’ve been reading Countdown, you know there are at present three major suspects.
IF IT IS DARKSEID: It will probably be good.
IF IT IS THE SOURCE: It’ll be weird, but it was Grant Morrison writing this in the first place, so.
IF IT IS SUPERMAN PRIME: I don’t care if Grant Morrison channels the spirits of Tolkien, Spillane, and Kerouac into one mad collective creative genius under his control. Nothing with Superman Prime in it is good. He actively detracts from any comic he shows up in because he is just that sad and lame. “What if Superman were crazy and evil” is not a horribly fresh concept to begin with in the first place, and “also what if he were a comic fanboy” does not make him particularly ironic or amusing.
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Nothing with Superman Prime in it is good.
He was an awkward character to have around during Crisis on Infinite Earths, and even though he and his alternate-universe brethren were given about as good an ending as a fictional character can have, no, they drag them back into the fray in Infinite Crisis and either corrupt or kill them (or in the case of Alex Luthor, both). And unless I missed a geek meeting, there was no massive outpouring for these characters to be unearthed. Prime’s a character with such a convoluted and contrived backstory that that seems reason enough to exile him to the dustbin of infinity, but saddle him with the Supermanchild persona and he’s not even a feasible character anymore, just a naked narrative construct for death, destruction and dismemberment. “Tedious” doesn’t scratch the surface.
But I have to believe Grant Morrison realizes this. (Also the idea of Prime being responsible — for anything — is just laughable.) My vote is the Source, and God knows what Morrison’s reimagining it as. I’ll be keeping an eye on it from a distance.
Okay, now I want to see Tolkien writing modern comics.
Tolkien writing modern comics would rock so hard. Of course, I suspect he would also be having Ultimates levels of lateness.
In regards to Supermanboy-Emo-Prime? I’m so glad that he was apparently blown the hell up. Though I do think that the Final Crisis will revolve around Darkseid. At least, that’s my hope, anyway. Dude is one of the biggest bads in the DC universe, treat him like that instead of an ineffectual punching bag for Superman once every six-eight months or so.
With you on the Doonesbury thing. It’s the only American newspaper strip I can actually take seriously; it’s been running in the Irish Times since long before I was old enough to get the jokes, which means I’ve had enough time to see stories develop, characters grow old and die, children be born and grow up… unlike with other American strips, where all I ever get to see is one or two isolated strips that don’t amount to much on their own.
I’ll give you that the grand majority of material with Emo Boy Prime is annoyingly bad, but I think his one-shot during Sinestro Corps was decent. I like the idea of a pathetic, simpering man-child with giant persecuation complex and all the powers of Superman as a villain, for the same reason I enjoy ideas like a rogue Captain Marvel and Johnny Bates: children’s minds can be very scary when you give them the ability to enact their impulses upon the world. The problem being, there are apparently few people at DC who can write a character like that without making him a whine factory. The one-shot at least had the virtue of pushing it into terrifying absurdy — Aquaman must die, because he shouldn’t be using a sword! On top of that, Johns at least understood that if you’re going to have the entire Teen Titans and JSA fight what is essentially Superman, you might as well do something big like make it a running fight across the continental United States.
Morrison might be able to do something with SBP, but he’d definately have to be at the top of his game to turn back the spiral of suck that character’s been stuck in.
It is my firm belief that Superman-Prime succeeds at comedy relief, so he’s not entirely useless as a character.
Ultimate FF is one of the books I’ve been reading every couple of months at the local library, usually after three or four issues pile up. It’s not bad. There’s that fine line between enjoying the read and feeling like I’m personally killing the book by not paying for it, but I can’t buy every damn thing.
I like Superman Prime. I think it’s funny as hell to have an answer to “what if the average comic fan was in a comic book and also had Superman’s powers.”
I heartily wish every day that someone at Marvel will have an epiphany and start the creation of Ultimate Ghost Rider.
In regards to Doonesbury, I know at least the early 70’s stuff was collected into myriad novel-sized digests, way back in the day. I get the impression they might have been edited for length, though.
UFF was a great book for me for a while, and I was getting the trades religiously, but the recent changes in artists (especially the current one, Kirkham) have turned me off from the series.
I feel that Carey had really contributed some stories to the UFF that have the originality I have come to appreciate in writers like Ellis and Morrison, but if the art is sub-par, it makes for a horrible combination.
Maybe I’ll get it again one day in the future, depending on what happens to it the title in Ultimatum…
I gave up on the Ultimate universe when I realized that it wasn’t of finite duration. As a finite series, it could work–cherry-pick the best Marvel stories, re-present them in a “greatest hits” sort of package, use the good stuff and build it to a really cool climax, then let it end. But if it’s of unlimited duration, and it never moves past pastiche, then sooner or later, I realized, they’ll have to cannibalize all the crappy stories that they supposedly restarted the Marvel Universe to avoid, lame characters and ideas that were mistakes the first time around, and are even bigger mistakes now that they know they’re mistakes and are making them anyway. So I dropped it.
Since that time, we’ve had Ultimate Cable, Ultimate Stryfe, Ultimate Onslaught, and the Ultimate Clone Saga.
I should probably start picking horse races. 🙂
I’m still highly dubious that Final Crisis will actually pick up on ANY threads from Countdown to Final Crisis.
Doesn’t anyone remember Countdown to Infinite Crisis? The seemingly endless parade of miniseries and tie-in issues? Were any of those about Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime conspiring to recreate the Multiverse? No, because DC didn’t want to give away that shocking reveal until Infinite Crisis #1, which meant they couldn’t reveal the plot of the entire Inifnite Crisis story during their entire Countdown to said story. So we got something like two years of buildup about OMACs and Spectre stepping on shit, and then Infinite Crisis ends up being about something else entirely, with a very nominal attempt to tie everything together by having Alex build a macguffin out of discarded OMAC parts and unsold issues of Day of Vengeance. (To be fair, the explanation of what all the stuff had to do with Alex’s plan made sense; it just wasn’t so fascinating that we needed to see all of it before Alex showed up to explain what he needed with it.)
At best, Darkseid, the Source, and Superman-Prime’s actions in Countdown are being manipulated by some unseen power who’s the real antagonist in Final Crisis. But that antagonist’s plans are probably going to have bugger-all to do with Granny Goodness operating a women’s shelter or Jimmy Olsen having wacky super powers.
Great. Now I want to see Johnny Bates take on Superboy Prime. Just when I thought DoublePlusBad EmoBoy had no purpose at all.
(And just so we’re clear, Bates would obliterate Prime. Slowly and painfully.)
I don’t know if they’re still in print, but the first several years of “Doonesbury” were collected into five or six very large paperbacks in the early-mid eighties. As a wee sprout, I inhaled them all, and was thus the only kid in my age cohort who had a decent knowledge of Watergate and the course of the Vietnam War. (A gag strip about the secret bombings in Cambodia is my favorite Doonesbury strip of all time. However, twelve year old boys in Ronald Reagan’s America weren’t supposed to know about such things.) These books were well worth reading. A full “Doonesbury” collection is necessary, dammit! Perhaps not in the Fantagraphics “giant hardcover volumes” approach, which are meant to be archives of dead strips, but something big and mighty nevertheless.
The artist for “Final Crisis” had an interview on Newsarama, where he claimed that FC wasn’t originally intended to be any sort of “crisis” at all. Instead, Morrison had this big story idea, and editorial later decided to make it into the third “crisis.” That gives me hope that it may not suck as much. Then again, who knows how much editorial has monkeyed with the story after deciding it needed to be the “third in the Crisis trilogy.” It also suggests that Superboy-Prime won’t be the key player. I’m betting it’ll be The Source.
With you on Doonesbury. They print it in the Guardian here and every time I read one I think “yeah this is pretty funny. But I sure wish I knew who the hell these people were.”
I want to take back what I said about SBP. Because I dawned on me with… horrifying clarity what he truly was.
A thinly-written Bizarro. The X-treme 90’s remake of Bizarro, if you will. Even if his career as a villain didn’t start until the early 2000s.
And damnit, a storyline about Bizarro confronting Superman over the Justice League’s supposed moral decay would’ve been awesome….
First: Shame on you for the Bizarro comparison.
Second: I think the best thing Morrison could do with Superboy Prime is kill him. Preferably by having the Flash punch him in the face after running around the Earth 3,000,000 times in under a millisecond and launching him into Rao.
I would also like ultimate ghost rider, but am scared they about how the will mess it up
sorry for my bad spelling i was talking to someone at the time and was distracted.
Wouldn’t an evil Superman with a knowledge of comics be Secret Original from the Filth?
87-89 the weakest period for Doonesbury? Come now! We’re talking about when Zonker was in the House of Lords! JJ left Mike for the first time! JJ gave birth to Alex on cable! Duke was president of a condoms company! Duke was committed to Bellvue! Duke was Donald Trump’s yacht captain! Phil went to white collar prison! Mr. Butts! Ron Headrest! Hunk-Ra! George Bush the Invisible Man! The Skull and Bones Society! The development of the “multi-camera” visual style! Sure, it’s probably the period that most suggested that Trudeau may have been abusing recreational drugs, but I’d say the strip’s nadir would be somewhere in the late 90’s, perhaps around the point when he decided Zipper was bound to catch on with readers.
Hunk-Ra and Invisible George are honestly two of the lowest points for Doonesbury – a stupid joke and an irrelevant one. I mean, in 1989 George Bush was everywhere, practically a political rock star (as weird as that sounds).
It didn’t really pick up until the first Gulf War got started.
The invisibility was never about a lack of profile, but about a lack of substance, about how Bush didn’t stand for anything (though the joke about “President Un-Dukakis” put it a bit more succinctly). Of course Bush’s Gulf War undermined this point, but Trudeau’d already been drawing him as a point of light for over two and a half years by that point.
Gotta admit, I agree with all the points that you bring up about Mike Carey’s UFF run but I *still* find it almost impenetrably dull. I always feel like he has good ideas for what to do with the FF, but then fails to make the FF enough of a focus for the narrative and also fails to make the new villains and the exposition of the latest big ideas sufficiently fun and interesting to compensate. Whenever I read it I keep feeling like I should be more involved than I actually am.