Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Ultimates #1 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Ewing does a great job of laying out the raison d'être for this team right at the start, letting us know that their goal is to solve problems on the cosmic scale before they become problems on the Earth scale.  He also starts by showing us that he's not thinking small:  although we're led to believe that Blue Marvel and Captain Marvel are going to try to kill Galactus, they're actually there to help him solve his hunger.

Moreover, it seems that Ewing is going to be the one to explore what Secret Wars meant from a cosmological stand-point.  Blue Marvel begins the issue by expositing how he's spent most of his life trying to get a molecule called neutronium to exist in our reality.  It's apparently the "superposition of matter and antimatter in total harmony," but it hasn't been able to exist in "normal space" because its atoms fell into an unstable structure of sevens.  Suddenly, it now has a structure of eight, and Blue Marvel wonders if it's because of "Secret Wars," the event that everyone is apparently struggling to remember.  He thinks that it may actually mean that we're on the eighth iteration of the Omniverse.  Meanwhile, Ms. America and Spectrum (a.k.a. Monica Rambeau) are seeking an item that exists across realities, though we don't know why.  But, it implies that multiple realities still exist after "Secret Wars," again raising all sorts of questions about the status quo that the series is (eventually) going to establish.

The good news is that Ewing isn't ignoring the interpersonal dynamics in favor of ambitious plotting.  In fact, they promise to be just as exciting.  Given the arrogance that both Black Panther and Blue Marvel show here, it's pretty clear that they're not exactly going to see eye-to-eye all the time.  Moreover, Monica is impressed but also concerned about the amount of power that America wields:  you're left wondering if she's going to be a mentor or enforcer.  Meanwhile, Carol is all operations, the hammer that needs to drop to get the job done.  It all works more smoothly than Ewing's "New Avengers," a team that has a similar mission but with a mess of team dynamics.  I'm definitely more engaged in this series all ready than I am in that one (even though I care more about the characters there), so it's a good sign that Ewing is on the right track here.

*** (three of five stars)

No comments:

Post a Comment