About James Donnelly
Location: Chandler, AZ
Occupation: Professional Fanboy
Bio: James Donnelly works as a lowly peon, but once a week, he brings his fanboy expertise and his opinions to popsyndicate.com and it makes him happy.
Posts: 54
More from this author
Full of sound and fury… signifying pretty much nothing really.
I don’t know what it is about Warren Ellis, but he just bugs me. Maybe it’s all the techno-babble. Maybe it’s all the ginormous ideas that he has that just seem to run out of gas. Maybe it’s that he had the two most powerful characters in the Ultimate Universe and he just kinda wasted them. When I first heard about Ultimate Human, I thought that this was going to be a big four-issue throw down between Iron Man and Hulk. Now, I love the Ultimate Hulk. He’s hilariously funny and utterly horrifying. This is not a Hulk that can be calmed down by Rick Jones. This is a Hulk that would tear Rick limb from limb, eat his brain and laugh the whole while. I also love the Ultimate Iron Man. He’s all Stark all the time. He’s a billionaire drunk lothario who just happens to be one of the smartest men alive. He’s not tortured like the Tony Stark of the regular Marvel continuity. He’s just got a certain zest for life that would make Nic Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas” look like the poster boy for Alcoholics Anonymous. That being said, I really did enjoy the first three issues of Ultimate Human, but issue #4 is where it just all fell apart.
Last issue, we were more formally introduced to Peter Wisdom aka the Ultimate Leader, and how he came to be. He’s a former MI-6 D.Ops (Director/Operations for those of you who didn’t read Greg Rucka’s brilliant Queen and Country) who was so zealous in the defense of his country that he had helped develop the BEP (British Enhancile Program). When the project was threatened by James Braddock’s European Defense Initiative, he decided that he would use himself as the guinea pig for the BEP, which just happens to be made up of Bruce Banner’s failed Super-Soldier serum (or now affectionately termed ‘Hulk-Stack’) and stolen tissue samples of Tony Stark and his nanofleet. He was injected… and then became a monstrosity of a man with a cranium so oversized it has to be kept in a brace to keep it from snapping his neck. But it also came with some interesting effects, like the ability to control minds, and kill them from the inside out. It’s David Cronenberg by way of Warren Ellis. He has had Stark, and a essentially depowered Banner (who now has his own nanofleet that will keep the Hulk cells at bay, courtesy of Stark) hostage, and he intends to bleed them dry, literally, so that he may harvest more of their DNA and become the Ultimate Human. Hence the title, get it?
So this one has everything riding on it, and some incredulous jumps of logic. In order to save their lives, Stark must shut down Banner’s nanofleet and force him into becoming The Hulk, sadly ruining his chance at a normal life. It’s a bummer but it has to be done, and there’s no one Stark won’t sacrifice to save his own skin. So it’s The Hulk versus The Leader. That’s a pretty decent contest. Actually, not really. Sure, Hulk is stupid and Leader is super intelligent. But the ability to throw men several hundred feet and punch the face off of someone else of his size and strength does kinda trump ‘kills people with his mind’ guy. And where is Iron Man? He’s calling one of his suits. Not so he can get in it, mind you. And that’s just another one of the things about this issue that bothers me. But it was the ending that I thought was the most annoying and required the biggest suspension of disbelief I’ve ever required, and it goes something like this: “Ok, I’ll hide behind this building and let the huge military cargo plane crash about 10 yards away from where I’m standing… and I’ll be fine!” And guess what? He was!
It just didn’t deliver. And this makes me very very worried about Astonishing X-Men when Ellis takes over. Although in Ellis’ defense, I did love his very short series Jack Cross. If you can find those back issues, pick ‘em up. Meanwhile, while I did like the art by Cary Nord, it leaves me with this feeling that this is what Bryan Hitch’s art would look like if it was shot entirely in soft focus.
In the end, it’s more penultimate than ultimate.
Ultimate Human #4
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Cary Nord
Colors by Dave Stewart
Letters by Dave Sharpe
