Dread's gonna rip USM a new one.
I plan to. So bad it gets it's own seperate post, to keep it away from other books I talk about.
DREAD'S BOUGHT/THOUGHT for 1/17/07: Part Number Two (and I mean "Number Two")
TURD WITH STAPLES (sold in the States as ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN) #104: There once was a time where I would read this book in trade and anxiously count the weeks before I could pluck down a twenty for another 6 issues or so. Then by the time I hopped on monthly for SABLE, the series still had enough hits that I did look forward to issues, even if they were repetitive, regurgitated the same mistakes from past arcs, and underwhelmed. After all, I felt, this was Spider-Man at his roots, reinvented for the 21st century. The book balenced and intertwined his superhero life with his soap opera of a civilian one, and that is essential to Spider-Man. Even when he hangs out with the Four or dates Shadowcat of the X-Men, that essence was there. I mean I'd abandoned ASM and most other Spider-books for over a decade before CW, but USM I stuck with, after deciding to give the trades a try after it'd been around a year or so. But then CLONE SAGA happened, and it's so bad that I'm venting all of my frustrations that I had with the title, even when I liked it, onto this buffalo crapfest of a story. Quite frankly the best thing about it is the cover. What a dynamic cover. Spider-Man, with Spider-Woman behind him, facing a tech-ier looking Dr. Octopus, with their placement revealing quietly that they're all standing sideways on the wall of a building, overlooking the city. What a shame that inside, you get Peter in torn civvies and Jessica fighting Ock in a sandstorm of inked pencil swurls. Maybe Bags was trying for manga, and failed. NOW, when I pick up an issue of USM, I look forward not to the contents, but on trashing it at SHH. I look forward to hating it. I read half of it on the bus ride over here and once I sat down again I honestly considered not bothering and giving ULTIMATE X-MEN a try. Even the title on the cover is draining; CLONE SAGA, PART 8. Part EIGHT! And NINE is next month! Holy horse-****, who on god's green earth believes this warrented 3 quarters of a year's worth of issues (including a double sized, increased priced, shamelessly padded out with ads and recaps issue #100)? This is an age where all of Whedon's stories move slowly at 6 parts and this is 50% longer! Even if it was decent I might be tiring of it by now, as I am with CIVIL WAR sometimes (and that is a mere 7 issues). Heaven knows HOUSE OF M was 8 issues and a good 4 went nowhere. But this is Bendis' longest yet and it's just not worth anyone's time. It's not even worth printing; how I pity that poor, poor printer having to vomit up maybe 80,000+ issues of this. If industrial printers had voices, it would scream and beg for death after printing these for 7- 8 months.
And what makes it MORE infuriating is that Bendis brought this upon himself. The last CLONE SAGA dragged on for 2 years and was the definition of a crappy Spider-Man story, reaching the apex of bad 90's stuff, but at least their excuse was they had no hindsight in the beginning. The writers had no idea how hostile the fanbase would get and they got bogged down by editorial blunders to stretch it out. And as it was a crossover I am sure it had a lot of "too many cooks" syndrome, much like THE OTHER. But this was maybe 8 years later. Bendis has the knowledge of hindsight. Even if he didn't, he had Bagley aboard to tell him horror stories as he was still drawing ASM back then, since we know that getting Bendis to read back issues is like expecting a whale to grow legs. He had a solo title and a fresher, newer universe for his hero (and, if you want to go there, an unmarried one). And despite all that Bendis STILL dove us headfirst into a storyline that is a Spider-fan's DEFINITION of what NOT TO DO with Spider-Man anymore, and he sent it to hell in a 3rd of the time. Why? Because apparently no idea has ever been done unless Bendis himself has done it, and he's like King Midas where even his feces is supposed to be golden, apparently. And I used Midas on purpose because like him, Bendis' gift has become a curse. He does have some good ideas, but he's struggled many a time on executing them, and he has an ego bigger than the moon when, combined with coddling editors, doesn't force him to grow as a writer but remain trapped in his schtick. The past 4-5 arcs of USM were repetitive enough and CLONE SAGA is almost a nightmarish rehash of all of them. Bendis will never admit this story is flawed, no matter who brings the flaws to his face.
MJ becomes the Demon Were-Gerbil again before the 5th page, usually a sad indicator. Nick Fury and Trask, along with a small army of nameless soldiers, bark back and forth about who is arresting whom in a rehash of the past 2 issues. And Peter & Spider-Woman get ready to face down Ockneto and his Tentacles of Doom. Okay, okay, last month I claimed that Ultimate Ock having magnetic powers had some originality to it, and I stand by that. This is Ultimate and if you can't make some changes here and there, it's no fun. Lord knows BKV made some dramatic changes to some characters in his ULTIMATE X-MEN run (Mr. Sinister is the biggest, but he also made Longshot a killer, Spiral merely a six armed warrior with zero mystical powers, et al). It's the nature of Ultimate. The problem is that it makes utterly no sense why Ock didn't reveal this before and use it to kick ass and save himself from being arrested, sometimes by far more powerful adversaries. He didn't bother with this in HOLLYWOOD, when Spider-Man beat his ass a second time and threw him behind bars. And he didn't reveal this in ULTIMATE SIX, when only the Ultimates, his universe's most powerful team, were beating him down to return him to jail. Both of those written by Bendis. No, he reveals it now, when attacked by some clones that are able to be killed within a page if he concentrates, as Six-Arms showed. It comes across as an idea that Bendis just thought of and threw in, like a lot of what happened in Clone Saga. Such as why if they were making Parker-clone soldiers, did they clone an older version just to pretend to be his father, or remake Carnage in a clone of GWEN and not Parker? It makes no damned sense but to swing to the whims of a flawed story. This is supposed to be the dramatic showdown, but it's ruined because Bagley's art gets very sketchy. Obviously the inkers and colorists needed to do a lot of work on some panels that resemble a sandstorm. Some panels look great but others look rushed and I wonder if the Clone Rehash is inciting some PTSD in Bagley. One panel has Peter's leg looking like rubber as he jumps over a tentacle. Maybe after 8 issues Bagley is tired of the story, too. As expected, Peter doesn't beat Ock here, but needs Spider-Woman to basically carry him through the fight and at best acts as her sidekick. In itself that's not so bad as Peter's beaten Ock twice on his own, cleanly, but this is coming after several arcs in a row where Spider-Man has utterly failed to beat the main villian, and/or needed to be carried by a far more competant, female fighter. It gets ridiculous that this title has become so predictable, and that simply means Bendis is burnt out, understandably after over 95 issues, and needs to go, or hire a co-writer and check his ego enough to listen. SABLE: Needed Sable to beat Vulture. DEADPOOL: needed Kitty to beat Deadpool. MORBUIS: Needed Morbius to beat the Vampires. ULTIMATE ANNUAL #2 (which was good, BTW): needed Daredevil to beat people. Even the beginning of CS, needed Kitty to beat the Ringer, an Ultimate version of an Z-List hoser. Sue and Richard Clone talk on a roof about the revelation, and it's supposed to be potent, but it's mired when several panels are wasted on Bendis' easilly-spoofed-by-fans "repeato-dialogue" where every line is repeating something the last one just said. And I would like to note this is the 5th issue where Spider-Man has been nowhere near his costume. Maybe that doesn't matter to Bendis, but it is one of thoss pesky superhero genre expectations that he bucks out of arrogance or spite. And it's also the 5th issue WITHIN THE SAME SCENE, for F's sake! They'll throw the "it reads better in trade" garbage, but you can't ignore the viewing reality of the 85,000+ readers who read this monthly. But this story needed to be rejected at the editting board. It was a corpse that didn't need resurrecting. It ends where MJ is cured of the Oz formula, because Dr. Storm had been working on a cure, although Fury never bothered to ask it be used on Norman Osborn back when SHIELD and the Four were chummier. And I STILL don't understand why if Fury at least knew Parker had been cloned, he wanted to arrest HIM. Shouldn't he have informed Parker, insisted on his help with the Spider-Slayers in tracking them down and going from there? No, he has to go overkill on the *****e thing just for story purposes. Reed then offers to cure Peter of his powers. Obviously after all this, this is meant to be a tough decision. If I was Peter I'd just kill myself, or steal one of Reed's machines and take my chances with the Marvel Zombies world. Nevermind that it was the CIA that cloned Peter, and it was their bad ideas that caused this, much like Conners and Rielly's created Carnage; had Peter no powers, he'd never have been able to at least try to stop them. And then all of the villians he has beaten would have gone unstopped, like Osborn (who was making Oz anyway) and so on. And then after breaking up with MJ because his life was too dangerousn for her and she was too dumb to stay out of it, after her life has been in the worst danger yet, he gets back with her, figuring that she'll be in danger even if they are broken up, so they should get back together. Plus, it's the 616 status quo, and she can't upstage him in front of villians like Kitty does. Since Bendis has already done the "Spidey quits" storyline, it's time to do the "Spidey tries to erase his powers" storyline, or at least visit it. I know I'm probably nitpicking to death here, but I am just so damned tired of this storyline. AND IT STILL HAS AN ISSUE TO GO!
Right now, USM is like drugs to me. I don't like it, it gives me nothing but
agita, and it takes money from my wallet. But I just keep finding more excuses to stay on it, and can't stop. The latest excuse is, "ULTIMATE KNIGHTS looks good", until I saw that ULTIMATE RONIN, yet ANOTHER failed plot point that Bendis just won't let die ("The 3rd time's the charm, tuchas-heads!") is coming up here. On some other sagging Ultimate titles with new writers I can at least reasonably hope for improvement; Kirkman's been on maybe a year and Carey not even half of one. But Bendis is the writer for the forseeable future and as the misses start to outweight the hit's I really need to consider how vital this title is. I'd hate to miss a good story, but is that possible from Bendis, unaided, on USM after 95 issues? BKV at least had the heart to leave his beloved RUNAWAYS while it was in it's prime and before he started writing stories like, well, THIS, when the well is dry and you're sucking on rocks for the moisture. Even Bagley has called it day soon. It's insanity to expect more goodness from Bendis after this TURD WITH STAPLES storyline. But, sadly, I probably am a bit insane.
But to everyone else out there? STAY AWAY! I cannot recommend USM in any sense of the fashion right now, or next arc, or maybe ever again. If you are tempted to buy an issue, or a trade after DEADPOOL, don't even bother. I don't care if you want to be a completist, or want to see if it really is as bad as I say. If you do buy it, set it on fire and wipe it's atoms from the earth. Lord knows if Bendis was offering cash refunds for this like he was on DISASSEMBLED, I'd take him up on it. In fact, I wouldn't even want money, I'd ask for him to invent a flipping time machine like Mr. Peabody and give me back the hours I've spent reading, reviewing, and buying this mess. This and FRONTLINE #10 are standing neck in neck for "Why People Don't Read Comics, Evidence A" for the past 30 days. Bart Simpson is wrong, it IS possible to "suck and blow at the same time", and it's Ultimate Clone Saga. Run, save your children, and never look back. It stinks so bad that in a million years when alien archeologists dig through our bones, they'll mistake it for toilet paper. It makes anything written by Austen or Zimmerman look like the land of milk & honey. It's so bad that in comparison I'd give Howard Mackie the Lifetime Achievement with Spider-Man award.
And there still is a Part Nine. Even the apocalypse only had four horsemen. It's almost an excerise in how bad a story Bendis can write and still be given untouchable A-List status by Marvel. It's just...poopy. I guess the Ultimate line needed a story that was the embodiment of crap, and this serves that role. Now that it exists, all writers have something they know to avoid. Thanks for reviving this dross, Bendis. Thanks a lot. You EARNED baldness for this one.
t:
Dread, I thought the FF review was long... I can't even read the USM one until later. Damn you have a lot of hate.
