ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #84
© Marvel Comics
Comicscape - October 5, 2005
By: Al BrownDate: Wednesday, October 05, 2005
You ever see that Bruce Campbell movie Bubba Ho-Tep? It's about how Elvis and JFK are alive and well (okay, sortof well) in a Texas nursing home. And JFK is black. So then they fight a mummy. It's not, actually, as good as its premise - but then I'm fairly sure that nothing in the universe, including a three-way with Angelina Jolie's character from Hackers and Elisha Cuthbert wearing that vest from the first season of 24, could ever be as cool as that premise. Once you say "Elvis and JFK team up from their nursing home to fight a mummy", there's really nowhere to go but down.
Sometimes I imagine that years from now I'll be reading X-Men and it'll be just like Bubba Ho-Tep. Cyclops will have cataracts and his optic rays will shoot crooked. Emma will look creepy, like all old ladies with fake boobs do, and Beast will have a full-body combover. Wolverine will have adamantium dentures. (Actually, Wolverine's already a crotchety old man. Screw Superman vs. Thor, what I want to know is this: between Batman and Wolverine, who would win in a crankyfest? They've both been teetering on the edge of "You dang kids!" for years.)
Yes, these are the things I think about. And if all that actually happened it would be funny for a couple issues, and then it wouldn't be. And that all brings us to aging and the eternal question: Should characters age?
Erik Larsen (Savage Dragon) wrote a brilliant column for Comic Book Resources a while back (be warned, though, that dude wants to marry italics and have a million babies), the gist of which basically is that it's selfish for fans to ask comic book characters to age, because eventually - well, if comic book characters age, we inevitably will end up with Nursing Home X-Men.
Even if the characters age very slowly, the fact that they age at all means that by necessity they eventually are too old to be any fun. Hell, the best case scenario is that the comic book industry puts a halt on their aging right around 40 or so, which is kinda what it feels like DC has done. (Don't write me and correct me - I'm just saying that lately everyone feels like they're 40.) And then they're making the same decision they could have made years ago, but now they're making it when the character's already been divorced three times.
Now for what it's worth, I don't think young fans have a problem with heroes who are at least somewhat older than them. I started reading comic books right around X-Factor #1. That means Cyclops' girlfriend had already died and he'd married her clone and then the original was miraculously resurrected - things that wouldn't happen in my love life for at least eight years. I had no problem with this at the time. The X-Men seemed tough and a bit weather-beaten. But they still only seemed like late 20s or early 30s at best. It would've been a different story if, when I'd started reading, they were already applying for Medicare. So there's a limit to our willingness to put up with characters who are older than us, which I think is sortof Larsen's point. Comic books can't just be aging folks all willy-nilly. The whole point of comic books is that they last forever. By necessity, therefore, so must their heroes.
(The only genre that can really be compared to comic books, in terms of being a never-ending episodic story, is soap operas. And they do apparently deal more or less accurately with time, and yes, I did have to check the Internet to find that out. But it's not really an accurate comparison, because soap operas are totally lame. Joking, Passions fans, I'm sure they're awesome.)
But here's the next thing: I am actually one of those fans that wants to see my favorite characters age. Because what happens is, I imagine a world where Peter Parker never got around to sleeping with Mary Jane, much less marrying her, and it's friggin boring. Right? How long can they hold your interest by holding hands? There's no character development. Nothing - aside from this month's slugout with Green Goblin or whatever - happens.
There are ways around it, to be sure. There are ways to grow your character without specifically aging them. You can give Storm a mohawk, for instance. But there aren't enough ways around it to avoid it forever. Sooner or later characters are gonna start dating someone. Sooner or later they're gonna get laid, and sooner or later either some of them are gonna start thinking about marriage, or someone's gonna point out that everyone in the Marvel Universe is terrified of marriage and is it possible that Editorial has a bit of an issue with commitment?
Which means that I've talked myself into a Catch-22 here. I believe that books where no aging occurs are pretty much boring, but I also understand that the concept of aging in a comic book universe is self-defeating. This is almost as troubling as the fact that I seem to have caught Erik Larsen's italicization fetish. Who would have known that italics were contagious? Screw you, Erik Larsen! If someone ever lets me take over writing Savage Dragon I'm totally gonna kill him off for revenge. Or at least give him a mohawk.
Luckily, I have a solution to the whole situation. It's the Ultimate line.
But wait...we all want Peter Parker to nail Mary Jane in Ultimate Spider-Man eventually too, don't we? Why should Peter Parker 616 be the only guy that gets to nail Mary Jane? Why, for that matter, can't I nail Mary Jane? Hold on, I'll be right back.
Okay. Yes, eventually Ultimate Peter, just like 616 Peter, must lose his virginity. And ten bucks says it's in issue 104. The Ultimate line is not in itself the solution to the aging problem. What it is - shockingly - is a successful ongoing recreation of the Marvel Universe from Day One. One that is succeeding (sales-wise, that is) in parallel to its original counterparts. And that - correct me if I'm wrong - is something that's never been pulled off before.
I suggest they do it again.
No, not right now. It's not time. Honestly, the Ultimate U still feels pretty fresh to me, if only because Ultimates comes out approximately at the pace of movies in the Terminator franchise. And Bendis moves so slowly that it feels like, 84 issues into his run on Ultimate Spider-Man, only about three weeks have actually passed. The Ultimate Universe celebrated its fifth anniversary not too long ago, and I suspect it has another few years left in it before it even starts to run the risk that its characters might feel too old for new readers.
What I suggest is that Marvel and DC launch new, parallel restarts of their universes - in addition to whichever universes may already be running - every ten years or so. That's infrequent enough that it would take a long time for things to get seriously glutted: forty years from now, we'd have max four or five universes spinning around. And realistically, not all of them will work. There's a better than even chance that some titles or some reimaginings won't last, and that's fine and it will probably help keep the number of universes under control. But young fans will be able to choose which stage of development they want to pick up their heroes at.
Again, not all of these parallel restarts will fly. Some will fail miserably. It's still too early to tell whether even the Ultimate line has permanent staying power; there's an excellent chance that they'll run out of steam eventually. Again, this will keep the number of parallel universes down a bit, which is a good thing. Fans will still have the original universes, and younger fans will have whatever version of their heroes work best for them.
This also doesn't fix anything about the classic Marvel and DC Universes. Their character have already aged somewhat and may continue to age (somewhat). The official universes are canon and will be around forever. They'll just have to keep shaking things up every few years with bizarre megacrossover ideas. But if one of the side effects of multiple universes is that mainstream Batman and X-Men end up with a few less titles, I'm not gonna say I'd be heartbroken.
Marvel's got a significant head start over DC on this, obviously: the Ultimate line has been a major success. It remains to be seen whether DC's All-Star project can come anywhere close. My guess is that it won't, for two reasons: 1) it's overshadowed by Infinite Crisis and 2) DC has picked established commodities for both All-Star Batman and All-Star Superman. Obviously all four guys involved with it - Frank Miller, Jim Lee, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely - are supremely talented dudes. But one of the reasons the Ultimate Universe felt so fresh was that Marvel turned some brand-new talents loose on it - at the time, Bendis and Millar were relative unknowns. That should be a given with any parallel restart: find the youngest and freshest talents - the real rising stars of the industry - and let them do their thing with as little editorial interference as possible. That'll help each restart feel cutting-edge, without any of the old stodgy baggage to keep it down.
I don't think most fans would end up collecting all of these universes. Maybe we'd try all of them. Maybe we'd stick with one or two. For most of us, one in particular would have characters who were more or less the same age as us. And over the years, those characters would age - not exactly at the same speed as us, but somewhat along with us. And eventually, when I'm old and I start screaming at strangers and refusing to wear pants, there'll be an X-Men out there somewhere where Beast's combover looks worse than mine. And I'll keep buying those X-Men every month and gumming the pages like they're the old - old, old, old - friends they are.
And you dang kids can collect Ultimate Ultimate Ultimate Scorpion.
New This Week
By Al Brown
DARK HORSE
Aeon Flux #1 (of 4) $2.99
How you feelin' about the upcoming movie starring Charlize Theron? Weird, huh? The MTV series was so specifically a cartoon - so stylized - that it's hard to imagine it translating well to live-action. It's directed by Karyn Kusama, whose sole previous credit is Girlfight - a good movie, but not much to go on. And is it me or is Frances McDormand in everything this year? I dunno. Could go either way.
Conan & The Demons Of Khitai #1 (of 4) $2.99
DC COMICS
Adventures Of Superman #643 $2.50
Albion #3 (of 6) $2.99
Aquaman #35 $2.50
Arkham Asylum Anniversary ED SC (MR) $17.99
Well, if you haven't read this book you probably want to. One of Grant Morrison's relatively early projects, with breathtaking art by Dave McKean. One of the best explorations of the theory that Batman is, in fact, only marginally more sane than his enemies.
Batman Gotham County Line #1 (of 3) $5.99
Early buzz about this miniseries by Steve Niles and Scott Hampton is excellent. Dark Knight as detective, with a splash of the supernatural.
Batman Strikes Vol 2 In Darkest Knight TP $6.99
Blood Of The Demon #8 $2.50
Detective Comics #812 $2.50
Gotham Central #36 $2.50
JLA Vol 11 The Obsidian Age Book One TP $12.95
JSA #78 $2.50
Justice League Unlimited #14 $2.25
Looney Tunes #131 $2.25
Outsiders #29 $2.50
Quitter HC (MR) $19.99
Harvey Pekar tells the story of Kurt Amacker's noble but ultimately doomed effort to halt his addiction to self-abuse.
Robotech The Shadow Chronicles #3 (of 5) $3.50
Showcase Presents Metamorpho Vol 1 TP $16.99
Son Of Vulcan #5 (of 6) $2.99
Supergirl #1 Third Ptg $2.99
Superman Shazam First Thunder #2 (of 4) $3.50
Swamp Thing #20 (MR) $2.99
Richard Corben (Hellblazer) draws as the Swamp Thing decides to shrink himself down until he can't feel pain anymore, eventually entering a subatomic universe where he parties with John Constantine. That plot rules.
Vertigo First Offenses TP (MR) $4.99
This is the second time Vertigo has released a bunch of its best series in anthology form, and it carries many of the same problems as the first: while it's a great idea, and while 168 page for five bucks is hard to argue with, it includes books like Grant Morrison's Invisibles - which ended something like five years ago. I guess the goal here is to spark trade sales, but you'd think they'd want to include some more recent titles as well. Sea of Red, maybe.
Wonder Woman #220 Second Ptg $2.50
IMAGE
Freshmen Migliari CVR #1 Poster PI
Invincible Vol 1 Ultimate Coll HC $34.95
Jack Staff #9 $3.50
Not sure if we've talked about this yet. It's extremely British, so watch out. If you're mystified by and suspicious of everything British people do, as I am, this book won't help. It's an extremely dense series of 2-3 page vignettes, each featuring one of like a dozen main characters, weaving into...ah, weaving into like a grand tapestry of Britishness. It's not nearly as bad as I just made it sound, but it's not my cup of tea either. Tallyho!
Mage The Hero Defined Vol 1 TP $9.95
Ring Of Roses TP (RES) $13.99
MARVEL
Amazing Fantasy #13 $2.99
I have this amazing fantasy about Keira Knightley, ten pounds of Easy Cheese and a pogo stick. This book is not about that.
Astonishing X-Men Second Ptg Variant #12 $2.99
Daredevil Redemption TP $14.99
Fantastic Four Iron Man Big In Japan #1 (of 4) $3.50
Note that the Tom Waits song "Big in Japan", off 1999's "Mule Variations", is almost certainly better than this book.
Incredible Hulk #87 $2.99
Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #8 $2.50
Marvel Monsters Devil Dinosaur $3.99
Much though I'd love to be all cynical and cool all the time, I am totally there for this. Devil Dinosaur, man! Rad. So rad.
Marvel Team-up #13 $2.99
Okay, I'm having a great time with this series. And it isn't all because of Moon Knight, either. It's just a fun little book. Hey, did you know Kirkman's taking over Ultimate X-Men? I'm pretty psyched for that.
Mary Jane Vol 2 Homecoming Digest TP $6.99
New Thunderbolts #13 $2.99
New X-Men Hellions TP $9.99
Powers #13 (MR) $2.95
Punisher #26 (MR) $2.99
Spectacular Spider-Man Vol 6 Final Curtain TP $14.99
Spider-Girl #91 $2.99
Spider-Man Door Poster $15.99
Spider-Man The Other Sketchbook $2.99
Hey cool, I can repeat the joke I made about The Other Poster last week! Fantastic. Ready? Okay: The Other Sketchbook, as opposed to The Sketchbook, which really isn't as good but does at least come with a gold foil variant cover. I live for repeating jokes that were incredibly stupid in the first place.
Supreme Power Nighthawk #2 (of 6) (MR) $2.99
If the first issue of this miniseries was anything to go on, this will be the best of the Supreme Power series.
Thor Blood Oath #2 (of 6) $2.99
Ultimate Marvel Flip Magazine #5 $3.99
Ultimate Tales Flip Magazine #5 $3.99
Ultimate X-Men Vol 1 HC $29.99
Uncanny X-Men #465 $2.50
X-Men Complete Age Of Apocalypse Epic Book 2 TP $29.99
X-Men Unlimited #11 $2.99
Both the stories in this sound like good ideas: Rachel Summers dealing with the fact that her mom is totally dead again and her dad is dating a slag, and a young Iceman using the Danger Room to practice making out (which is both incredibly obvious and, if you extend it to its obvious conclusion, way nasty). However, X-Men Unlimited is famous for taking good ideas and sucking the life out of them. Buyer beware.
