I’m just cranky and old and it’s best to just let me putter around with my own characters so I don’t think too much about this stuff.
17 Comments | Posted: August 9th, 2009 | Filed under: Thinking About Comics
1.
I’ve read and very much enjoyed Mark Millar’s ridiculous, over-the-top reinvention of The Avengers known as The Ultimates* since it began coming out. Even with its delays and too-cute mugging for the audience, it had just enough intelligence and wherewithal to keep me engaged and entertained, even if I knew it wasn’t a very good comic at all.
2.
Apparently, Marvel’s doing something with the Ultimate universe, rejiggering it and rebooting some things**, and one of those things was Millar creating an expanded Ultimate Avengers teams out of the mess. They’re pictured above, for your edification. There’s some of the usual people that years of reading Avengers comics mean that I like to see in an Avengers lineup: Cap, Thor, Iron Man. There’s also a few people that probably wouldn’t be on any Avengers team that I picked, but I’m not running Marvel comics, so hey, whatever.
3.
The thing that’s troubling to me is kinda simple and stupid and old mannish: among all these superhero types, there’s girl-with-guns (Black Widow,) purple-guy-with-guns (Hawkeye looking suspiciously like the Hate-Monger,) and black-guy-with-guns (Samuel L Jackson.) That’s three people with guns out of a lineup of eleven. That means that over a quarter of the Ultimate Avengers solve their problems with guns. That strikes me as overkill.
4.
It should be noted that one person using guns as part of a team of people with amazing powers and abilities strikes me as overkill. Guns are so common and ugly and silly***, particularly in a world where a living god could use his hammer to banish you to another dimension or a super-soldier hyped up on mega-dope from the 40s can disarm you with a thrown shield before breaking your jaw with his elbow. I think it was a wise man (Batman) who said guns make you stupid. They tend to make superhero comics stupid, too.
5.
So I guess I just talked myself out of buying Ultimate Avengers. OK, then.
*Not being a meth-headed loony who gets their kicks from that sort of thing, I chose to ignore Jeph Loeb’s run as much as possible. I know that The Blob ate The Wasp , which I’m sure gave someone, somewhere, the best erection of his life.
**For a company who’s always behaved as if their largest competitor’s history was unnecessarily convoluted and complex, the last decade has seen Marvel reboot, repackage, rewrite, and remove elements left and right for the sake of whatever the star writer at the moment seems to want. I’m fine with it, but it’s a case of the wok calling the kettle metal. Or something.
***I’m fine with guns in gun-friendly titles or movies or whatever. It’s just that they don’t work for me in superhero comics. That’s why I like the Punisher off on his own most of the time with very occasional ties and crossovers with the Marvel universe.
I hadn’t seen/heard about that Blob thing. Jesus.
If it helps any, I think the Ultimate Avengers are supposed to have sort of a rotating lineup kind of thing. So they may not have all three characters with guns at the same time.
…
Still a pretty safe bet that there will be a lot of guns, though.
Doc Savage and the Shadow used guns. I think it’s more of a “If you’ve only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail” situation.
Ain’t nobody confusing Hawkeye with Doc Savage or The Shadow.
Yes, they used guns. They also started to fade as the superhero meme got more popular. I love Doc Savage to death, but he’s an anachronism now, like The Spider and The Shadow (who I never liked as much unless the character was horribly broken like his mid-80s comics.)
I’m also pretty sure the upcoming Doc Savage insertion into the DCU is going to be a dud, for a lot of the same reasons. Why go with proto-Batman when you’ve got the real deal?
I hadn’t seen the Blob thing either, but when you said the Blob ate the Wasp I was imagining that he popped her in his mouth when she was wasp-size. This is much worse.
Honestly, Ultimates turned into bad 90s comics real fast. Like reading WILDcats again.
Your thoughts about guns in superhero comics makes me think of guns in the Dungeons & Dragons medieval fantasy setting — I always thought it was weird and lame that you could buy an arquebus in addition to a broadsword. It was just as unnecessary in that environment — dudes could throw lightning bolts around, and swords are cooler, so who wants some lame gun with terrible accuracy?
Wait, did I just out myself as a former D&D player? Crap. Next I’ll be going over my favorite decklists for Magic: the Gathering.
Millar’s Ultimate Avengers is apparently supposed to be the black ops squad, while Frank Cho does the Ultimates. People with guns makes more sense in that context (although probably still not enough).
Yes, because black operations/extreme versions of existing superhero groups has always worked well.
I loved Force Works when I was thirteen and had never read any Avengers or Iron Man comics ever.
For Ultimate Avengers I’ll do what I always do for Ultimate books, get the TPB or HC if it turned out to be good/interesting.
I’m just pleased to find my crappy picture is the first hit for “stands for France.”
Also: http://waffleneck.com/images/france.jpg
Yes, because black operations/extreme versions of existing superhero groups has always worked well.
It’s a bit serpent-eats-tail, but I thought, yeah, that did work really quite well in the latter days of Warren Ellis’ Stormwatch, which was to later issue forth Mark Millar’s Authority, which then led to the same but with Neocons bit, which we called the Ultimates. Und so weiter.
I can’t think of any other black-ops offshoots? I guess, was Force Works that? Or OG X-Factor? I never read any others.
It’s a bit serpent-eats-tail, but I thought, yeah, that did work really quite well in the latter days of Warren Ellis’ Stormwatch, which was to later issue forth Mark Millar’s Authority, which then led to the same but with Neocons bit, which we called the Ultimates. Und so weiter.
Ah. the exception that proves the rule, then. (Yeah, dunno how I missed that one considering how much I adore Ellis’s Stormwatch-Authority run. Probably heat fatigue.)
Two words: Extreme Justice.
Alright, that’s it for the comments.
Go ahead and shut this one down, Kevin.
And we’re out… : )
Lame post.
No guns in superhero comics.LOL.
Thank you for your insightful comment!