The latest comic in my reread of my whole collection is the collected first storyline of the Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Avengers, from 2002. I'm three issues in, but it's a weird book, in both good ways but perhaps more bad ways. It's one of very few Ultimate Marvel books I still have from back then, and I'm not sure I'll keep it after this read.
To start with, it's written by Mark Millar, whose work I don't particularly enjoy, apart from Superman: Red Son and a couple of issues of the Authority. It's drawn by Bryan Hitch, whose work I do enjoy, and who brings the same widescreen sensibility to the Ultimates that he evinced in his run on the Authority with Warren Ellis, and in his run on JLA with Mark Waid. Overall, the book looks gorgeous, with some beautiful splash pages and some good action - the first issue, where we see Captain America's last mission in WWII, is colored a bit oddly, so that it all looks muddy, but the rest looks amazing.
The team consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Giant Man, plus the Hulk in a support role (as Bruce Banner) and as an antagonist (when he inevitably hulks out). That provides one of several cognitive dissonances, because I'm reading this with the memory of the first MCU Avengers movie. There are definite overlaps between these versions of the characters and the movie versions, but they're not totally the same, which accounts for the whiplash. This book also has the version of Nick Fury that looks like Samuel L Jackson, which was brought to life in the actual movies.
Part of why I don't like Millar's writing is that everything is extreme and amped up. Iron Man is pretty recognizable from the movies (I'm not sure if he's meant to look like Robert Downey Jr, but there's at least one reference to the actor), in terms of his womanizing and partying. Giant Man is on prozac, because I guess Millar thought that would be modern or something? Thor is positioned as an environmental activist who's suspicious of Fury's motives, which I suppose allows Millar to claim he's putting his own politics into the book.
The portrayal I find least easy to enjoy is this book's version of Captain America. He's described as having "John Glenn's buzz-cut cool and John McCain's politics", which even back in 2002 was a red flag for me. There's a lot of comments where Cap calls people sissies or girls or whatever, and he's generally an asshole (cf that panel where they finally turn Hulk back into Banner and Cap kicks him in the face).
Obviously a guy from the 1940s who suddenly wakes up in 2002 (or 2012) wouldn't be a weekly guest on MSNBC or Air America, but this version has none of the vulnerability that Chris Evans brought to the character in the movies. Instead of the skinny nerd who became Cap because he hated bullies, this version feels like a bully himself.
I blame all this on Millar because he's that kind of self-proclaimed left-of-center person who uses that as a smokescreen to write a lot of gross stuff. Of course there's a difference between the art and the artist, but Millar always seems a little too pleased with himself when he's transgressing.
And more to the point, all this stuff dates the book horribly. In the third issue, SHIELD unveils the Ultimates and Cap in his new uniform, and there's an appearance from George W Bush. Hitch's drawings of Bush are weirdly stiff, because they're taken from photos, but even with all of Trump's outrages, just seeing Bush is off-putting. The regular Marvel Universe generally did a better job of not putting actual politicians into the books (the less said about that time Spider-Man hung out with Barack Obama, the better), and I wish Millar had done the same.
Anyway, it's a flawed book, but it's fascinating as a time capsule of what Marvel thought was cool in 2002, as well as an embryonic form of the Avengers we'd later see in the movies. It's also an attempt to make the Avengers cool, something that they definitely weren't in the regular Marvel Universe up until then. In fact, the best description of the 90s version of the team that I've heard is as a repository for characters whose books have been cancelled - that came from Max Carleton speaking on Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, and it feels so right.
I lost touch with the Ultimate Universe not long after this, and I no longer have the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men issues I bought when they came out. I'm given to understand that it was a weird time (apparently Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were in an incestuous relationship, which was treated as "modern" by the characters at the time, rather than deeply fucked up. Blame Jeph Loeb, who was writing it by then), but on the positive side it gave us the Miles Morales version of Spidey, so I can't complain too much.
But one of the pleasures of reading old comics is seeing how they fit into their cultural milieu, and the first arc of the Ultimates definitely transports me back to the early days of the War on Terror. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to be transported back to then.
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