The Ultimates Volume 1: Superhuman (2001-2002/ Collected 2002): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Bryan Hitch and Andrew Currie: Long ago when the millennium was new, Marvel's Ultimates line rejuvenated Marvel's place in the comics marketplace after bankruptcy and creative stagnation. The Ultimate universe was a grittier, darker place than the 'normal' Marvel universe. And it was made with one eye towards movies.
The Ultimates was the new line's version of the Avengers. It was really, really pointed towards movies, with Samuel L. Jackson being paid so that Marvel could use his likeness as Nick Fury. Yep. Seven years before Jackson's first onscreen appearance as Nick Fury, he'd already been pen-and-ink Nick Fury for seven years!
One can see a lot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in The Ultimates, obviously in Nick Fury and the idea that the Avengers were assembled by the government. Iron Man/Tony Stark is closer in personality to his movie version than the regular Marvel universe version. Hulk and Thor, not so much.
Oh, right. This is rapey, cannibalistic Hulk! Creepy stalker Bruce Banner! Wife-beating Ant Man! Mutant Wasp! Captain America is pretty much Captain America, though steroids now played a part in his creation. Indeed, the Hulk is also the accidental result of Bruce Banner's pursuit of a super-soldier formula.
Bryan Hitch's art is, well, widescreen, though there's also a lot of standing and talking. Writer Mark Millar, fresh off a popular, ultraviolent run writing DC-Wildstorm's The Authority, pretty much does the same thing here -- ultraviolence, snarkiness, and somewhat unlikable heroes. The comics readers of the time loved it! It all seems a bit dark and dreary now, especially all the stuff involving creepy Banner and cannibal rapist Hulk. What fun! Lightly recommended.
Superman Vs. Aliens (1996): written and pencilled by Dan Jurgens; inked by Kevin Nowlan: 20 years ago, DC and Dark Horse put out this fairly nifty battle between Superman (still in his mullet phase) and the Alien film franchise. It was a time when the Kryptonian Supergirl was still gone from DC continuity. That fact explains much of the storyline, in which Superman responds to a distress signal from a domed city in space that appears to have once been part of Krypton. It comes complete with a spunky blonde girl named Kara who's pretty much the image, in appearance and name, of the pre-1987 Supergirl.
The story is a bit heavy on the then-continuity of the Superman comics, from the mullet to the absence of Lex Luthor from the storyline. Superman can't travel unaided through space for long at this point in his career, necessitating some technology help from LexCorp. Or LuthorCorp. Whatever.
It's solid, unspectacular, and relatively unbloody fun. There's a bit too much harping on Superman's decision not to kill anything, including hordes of acid-blooded aliens. Is this a workable moral stance for the Man of Steel under the circumstances? Well, yes, but as written it relies an awful lot on other people killing aliens, which makes the moral stance seem awfully dubious, if not completely daft. A sin of omission rather than commission is still a sin.
Inker Kevin Nowlan makes the normally straightforward pencils of writer-penciller Dan Jurgens broody, moody, and intermittently menacing. It's a great job of inking in terms of establishing a tone a penciller isn't known for -- Nowlan did something similar with his inks on the sunny Jose Luis Garcia Lopez's Dr. Strangefate during the Marvel/DC crossover around the same time. Lightly recommended.
JLA: Justice League of America: Power and Glory (2015-2016): written by Bryan Hitch with Tony Bedard; illustrated by Bryan Hitch with Tom Derenick, Scott Hanna, Daniel Henriques, Wade von Grawbadger, Alex Sinclair, and others: Maybe getting the perennially late Bryan Hitch to both write and draw a new Justice League comic book way back in 2015 wasn't such a great idea because, well, perennially late.
It took so long for the nine issues of his initial story arc to appear that DC had already rebooted Hitch's Justice League title (now known as Justice League and not JLA: Justice League of America) when the last issue of this title came out. And by rebooted, I mean, there were as many issues of the subsequent title on the stands as there were of this title when that last issue appeared. Whew!
Hitch writes the reboot, but the art has been left to others. That's too bad because of Hitch's strengths as an artist, strengths that outweigh his strengths as a relatively new writer. Hitch's art, a career-long riff on Neal Adams and Alan Davis, made him a superstar nearly 20 years ago in the pages of ultra-violent superhero book The Authority. And he does good work here -- 'widescreen,' as they say, cosmic though sometimes crowded.
His writing seems a bit padded at times. Nine issues seems like about two issues too much here, with about 40 pages too many of running back and forth without resolving anything plot-wise. Hitch's new Justice League has shorter story arcs so far, suggesting that something may have been learned.
Power and Glory pits Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and the usual gang of super-powered idiots against the Kryptonian Sun-god Rao, who arrives in near-Earth space with a whole lot of super-powered followers and an offer to bring peace, health, and long life to all the citizens of Earth -- and indeed, someday, everyone in the universe. He's initially greeted as a saviour. And of course there's a catch.
Hitch throws a lot of super-science and bombastic, epic battles around the nine issues. And time travel, strange visitors with hidden agendas, and weird standing stones waiting to fulfill some plot point or another. It's good, overlong fun. One caveat: in order to finally put a capper on this story (and this JLA title), DC elected to have other people write and draw the final issue, with only the plot by Hitch. Given how long readers had waited by this time, a few more months could probably have been survived if the end result was an all-Hitch writing-and-drawing issue. Oh, well. Recommended.
Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliott, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, and Richard Bennett (1996-97; collected 2000): From 1996 to 2000, Warren Ellis was pretty much the State-of-the-Art in sophisticated superhero story-telling. And he did all his best work at Wildstorm, an Image imprint that would be sold to DC pretty much at the end of the bulk of Ellis' work at Wildstorm. Once Ellis had his feet under him on his first major work for Wildstorm, the pre-existing Stormwatch, he combined Alan Moore's mordant wit and Grant Morrison's Silver Agey hyper-science-fictionalism (!) with his own pragmatically optimistic take on the superhero: maybe they could be just good enough and idealistic enough to save us from ourselves.
Lightning Strikes continues Ellis' introduction of his own characters into Stormwatch, Jim Lee's United Nations-sponsored superhero response team. Stormwatch came complete to Ellis with Justice League-like orbital headquarters and SHIELD-like armies of agents and piles of heavy, science-fictional weaponry.
It also came with a Nick-Fury-like Director dubbed 'The Weatherman.' This was Henry Bendix, and in this second collected volume of Ellis' Stormwatch, the team is just beginning to realize that Henry Bendix is a homicidal megalomaniac who intends to save the world by taking total control of it.
But this is just becoming apparent: for now, Stormwatch continues in its missions to save the world from Extinction-level threats. Stories focus on Ellis-creation Jack Hawksmoor, defender of cities, and holdover Battalion, for whom Ellis has plans that will move him away from being team trainer.
Team co-creator and Wildstorm publisher Jim Lee supplies art for another standalone that pits Stormwatch against some particularly awful results of alien genetic experimentation on humans. Lee's art is perfectly suited to the material, while regular artist Tom Raney keeps things humming along in his installments. Raney's main job was to cleanly depict Ellis' occasionally violently harrowing action sequences while also working with Ellis' words to make the once-cardboard characters of pre-Ellis Stormwatch into appealing individuals. Raney succeeds. There's no epic here yet, but it's coming. Recommended.
Stormwatch: Change or Die: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliott, Oscar Jiminez, and Richard Bennett (1997; collected 2000): Warren Ellis's run on Wildstorm's Stormwatch builds to one major event here that will ultimately set the stage for Ellis and Bryan Hitch's 'widescreen' superhero team The Authority in a couple of years.
We learn more about the enigmatic Jenny Sparks, nearly a century old and not looking a day over 20. She controls electricity. She also claims to be The Spirit of the 20th Century. And as crazy-ass Stormwatch director Henry Bendix's plans for world domination get flushed into the open by the return of an idealistic, Superman-like hero called The High, Stormwatch finally faces the rot within itself.
Tom Raney and Oscar Jiminez do nice and sometimes startlingly gruesome work on the visuals, as Stormwatch battles an enemy it should be allies with and ostensive allies who are really enemies. It's a little like a John Le Carre novel, only with more punching and exploding. Highly recommended.
Stormwatch: A Finer World: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary, Michael Ryan, and Luke Rizzo (1997-98; collected 2000): Warren Ellis' version of Stormwatch begins its transition to being The Authority as we meet two soon-to-be members of that follow-up team, Apollo and the Midnighter. They're riffs on Superman and Batman, respectively. They're also lovers.
And they're on the run from Stormwatch, which they believe still to be run by nutty leader, the Weatherman Henry Bendix. He had them created as part of a secret team and then abandoned them when that team's first mission turned catastrophically wrong, leaving the two as the only survivors. They've been fighting evil in the shadows ever since. But new Weatherman Battalion wants to bring them into the light, preferably as allies.
Artist Bryan Hitch, he of the 'widescreen' action sequences and art that reminds one of comic-book great Neal Adams as funneled through later artist Alan Davis (Excalibur, The Nail), handles the penciling on the Apollo and the Midnighter issues. He'd return to those characters in the first 12 issues of the subsequent The Authority, to widespread fan-love. It's bombastic, finely rendered art, offering a nice counterpoint to writer Warren Ellis' shadowy conspiracies and a nice amplification of Ellis' large-scale action sequences.
The volume concludes with an alternate world take on Stormwatch, accidentally brought to 'our' Stormwatch's attention by a tunnel in The Bleed, the weird stuff between universes. It's a bit of an oddity -- enjoyable, but overly reliant on the mythology of shared universe book WildC.A.T.S. for its eucatastrophic finale. Michael Ryan's pencils are perfectly solid superhero stuff, though they lack the zing of Hitch or long-time Stormwatch artist Tom Raney.
This version of Stormwatch had only a couple of issues left in its existence, though somewhat confusingly that, too, would be tied intimately into WildC.A.T.S. (geez, I hate typing that). Two issues of Stormwatch and an extra-length WildC.A.T.S. Vs. Aliens (yes, the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise) would end this team's existence. While Stormwatch was always a United Nations-sponsored superteam, The Authority that would follow, with mostly new members, would seek to save the world without government support, and sometimes despite it. Recommended.
