Writer: Mark Millar
Artist: Steve Dillon
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Price: $3.99
Previously: The Avengers have met their match: a horde of vampires looking to recruit super heroes into their ranks. Led by the mysterious man in an iron suit, Anthony, the vamp army has just enlisted the newly turned Nerd Hulk and Kid Daredevil. After the first battle between the Avengers and vampires goes south, Blade descends on the Triskelion to take out the vampires’ biggest asset, the recently infected Captain America. It doesn’t go so well.
“There’s a world beneath your world, Mr Stark, and you can build all the cities and towers you like. It ain’t gonna go away.” –Blade
Sometimes the Ultimate universe comes off as if Marvel has given license to do a “What If …?” universe. A place where history and continuity have little meaning or long lasting consequences, almost like a disposable universe. Where writers can be as over the top with beloved characters and it doesn’t matter because these stories take place over here and aren’t part of the “canon” anyway, so just sit back and enjoy them.
That said, now throw in the second wave of horror tropes riding a wave of resurgent popularity. First zombies running amuck in the Marvel universe, now vampires. Add to the mix Mark Millar’s patented over-the-top sensibilities and snappy one liners, and you have Ultimate Avengers 3. Mark Millar’s Ultimate Avengers still carry the spirit of The Authority, moving at a cinematic scope yet filled with plenty of Millar being Millar: mocking the Twilight phenomena (which, cranky as I sound, believe me, this sequence alone is worth the price of admission); Blade as a smartass not a taciturn vambot, shooting folks to get them to shut up for a minute; and the Hulk vs Anthony.
“We don’t bow to any made up God. Defer to any man-made law. We just submit to our most basic values and follow even our darkest desires.” –Anthony
Like the vampires in 30 Days of Night, these vampires seem to roam about at will, eat from a buffet line of non-powered humanity, and basically give into their gluttony and excess. Their lives are reduced to wild, wanton wastes of wants and needs, being driven solely by desires, much like children without any parental supervision. In a lot of ways, they are like us, striving to live life on our terms, for our maximum happiness, not realizing how selfish this is. This points to our secret desires to set ourselves up as our own gods, determiners of our fate, and not realizing that we’re the problem.
We all have desires. Desires are good in and of themselves; it’s when they stray from their intended purpose that things go awry. Desires are also potential areas of temptation and sin. The desire to enjoy things can lead to evil desires that express themselves in physical activity (“lust of the flesh”); the desire to obtain things can lead to a covetous heart (“lust of the eyes”); and the desire to do things can lead to focusing our lives around such activity (“pride of life”).
But the purpose of desires is to lead us to right relationships, with God, with each other and to live in harmony with creation. We have to be met where we are, broken and lost, in order to move where we need to be.
The bullet point review of Ultimates 3 is … it is what it is. Seriously. Mark Millar scripting the Avengers will give you a romp that doesn’t always makes sense, have the characters acting in ways that often seem incongruent to how we’ve come to know them, but service the story/mood/joke, and in general be a good time. It is what it is, so you will either love it or loathe it, your mileage may vary.
“mocking the Twilight phenomenon”.. ah.. but why would you/Millar want to do *that*? Ah, precisely: because it’s something that *women* like, albeit mainly teen girls. Though actually *I* like Stephenie Meyer, Maurice, to a moderate degree: let that go on the record: I think she is like a lot of popular potboiler authors: unfairly maligned and snarked at by people who are jealous. She has had brickbats lobbed at her from all sides: including on the grounds of her Mormon faith/upbringing: though this element I have never seen in her books, which obviously owe *far* more to Jane Austen than Brigham Young. Not all Mormons are bigoted Glenn Becks. (I did tell you, on Twitter, about my Mormon friend at school! The class bully was always getting on her case about it &I hated him for it &his other crimes against humanity.)
Yeah: but Meyer’s teencharacters don’t immediately jump into bed with each other, “bcos she is a sexually repressed Mormon/wants to promote a purity cult” – right! It wouldn’t have more to do..
..with the fact that many actually *prefer* romance to steaminess: that is why Austen enjoys such enduring popularity! And of course, in this excuse for a society we now live in, it is generally OK only for *women* to admit they like romance &the idea of courtship (though I have noted that Victorian men were big into it: time for someone to reflect that in a “steampunk” novel, perhaps??) And of course, anything that *women* like (and that is unfashionable for men) in this oh-so-best-of-all-possible-worlds of ours, is by definition inferior, if not downright contemptible: hence the patronising term “chick flick”, a definition spread by a plethora of male chauvinist film reviewers.
Hmm. *And I wonder what you and Mark Millar and the aforementioned plethora would do, if some woman writer, or gods forbid, comics creator, were to create something that takes sideswipes, or even a head-on charge at.. those literary styles/plot points that YOU all seem to like, but which every self-respecting woman/feminist finds..
..contemptible: namely mindless violence/torture porn wankfests, which seem to have spread like cancers from their breeding grounds in trash pulp and video nasties, to infest the whole of Hollywood! (Comics gave up their idealism and sold out long ago.)
At any rate, I would far rather see *that* mocked, than see a Twilight parody, even a funny one. Looks like there is plenty of work to be done: “necessary tasks”, as the Marxists say, in certain areas, that just haven’t got done! Note to all non-feminists: *just you wait!*
(And don’t say the reason you don’t like Twilight is some artistic reason: quite other than because Meyer’s oeuvre aims to fulfil female fantasies: rather than pander to those of today’s philistinic and anti-social men! BECAUSE I WON’T BELIEVE YOU. We must be living in a retrograde society: because I haven’t seen any truly effective- or even sufficiently determined – takedowns – of The Dark Superhero/Unchivalrous Knight/SinBinCrapfest/Saw/Bore/HostelTorture memes that truly do infest pop culture now! The only thing that comes to mind is the image of that pest exterminator in Arachnophobia.. one of the few honest heroes in more recent years!)