Ultimate Comics Ultimates by Jonathan Hickman (and Sam Humphries) vol. 2

If you’ll recall, I liked the first volume of this a lot more than I was expecting to.  It had an epic scope with stakes to match and threats that felt convincing and meaningful in the context of the story.  I was expecting to get this volume a little sooner than I actually did but now that it’s here did it live up to my expectations?

Well, there’s both good news and bad news there.

The good news is that the first half of this volume meets those expectations in spades.  We get Tian, the Heavenly City ruled by Xorn and Zorn, drawn into the conflict between Reed Richards and his Children of Tomorrow.  We see the Hulk blackmailed into an all-out assault in The City.  We see the United States launch its entire nuclear arsenal at The City and the reprisal it engenders.  We also see the “Winter Protocols” enacted on Nick Fury and the rest of the Ultimates, turning the people best equipped to stop this crisis into fugitives.

As you can see, writer Jonathan Hickman keeps escalating the tension and stakes in this storyline and he does so at the perfect pace so it all feels natural and not rushed.  He’s ably abetted by Esad Ribic’s art which effectively conveys the scope of the conflict and sells its biggest and weirdest moments easily.  He can also shift gears from a round of talking heads to crazy action without missing a beat.  If he had also found some way of compensating for the open-mouth “gapeface” that a lot of his characters have, I’d have nothing to complain about with the art here.

However, and I know you all saw this coming, the second half is when it starts to fall apart.  Now it doesn’t fall apart completely, not to the point that I’d advise against buying this volume, but when you see the art style change you’re immediately snapped out of the spell that the first half had woven so effectively.  Though this second half isn’t illustrated by Ribic, it’s also the part where Sam Humphries comes on as a co-writer.  I’m not inclined to place the blame on Humphries for the failings here mainly because I feel that if the book had a consistent art style throughout I would’ve been able to overlook a lot of the little issues in the storytelling.  It doesn’t, though, and while I’ve liked Luke Ross’ work in the past the issue that opens up the second half is not one of his better efforts.  It lacks the painterly style of his best work and a lot of the characters seem awkwardly positioned in many scenes.  He’s not the only one to contribute art in the last three issues — issue eleven has THREE other artists credited to it — and the lack of a consistent visual style really hurts the narrative here.

The other thing about the second half is that it feels smaller, more intimate than the widescreen epic blockbuster style of the issues that preceded it.  You get more scenes of the characters fighting street-level battles and less of the conflict between the two cities.  Tian, in fact, is not mentioned at all in the last three issues.  This feels like the one real change I can put down to Humphries’ influence as a co-writer.  I will say that he does manage to capture the characters’ voices quite well and does a good job of running with the setup that Hickman had established.  To be perfectly honest, I might’ve continued to believe that Hickman had written the second half by himself had his co-writer not been credited in this volume.

Regardless of who wrote what here, things ultimately wrap up in a fairly rushed fashion.  Though I liked the idea behind the deus ex machina that Tony Stark ultimately unleashes on The City it’s also something that really needed another issue to fully set up.  Granted, it is foreshadowed a fair amount but the actual explanation for what it is comes right out of left field and gives it that “deus ex machina-ey” feel.  Also, some time to process and take stock of these events and set up the next arc would’ve been nice too.  We don’t get that as the last two pages dramatically shift gears to set up the next arc and may confuse people who haven’t heard about what happens there and may think that a younger Clint Eastwood will be joining the cast.

Okay, that last part’s a complete lie but it’s still pretty abrupt.  Anyhow, I do know where the next arc is going as part of the “Divided We Fall/United We Stand” crossover and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.  With the U.S. in shambles, someone has to rebuild it and there’s apparently only one logical choice for that.  Even if this second volume of “The Ultimates” was half of a great comic, it was still a good one on balance and that’s enough to keep me onboard to see where we’re going next.