One of the best things about Nick Fury returning to the Ultimates, sorry Ultimate Avengers, is how Mark Millar can get back to his characters being, well, douchebags for the greater good. They look the part and sometimes even act the part, but Nick Fury and his employees are anything but good people. They are willing to sacrifice anything, unwilling to compromise and, in a bold move away from the miracle that is casualty-free superheroing, kill. And that is just what this issue gets.
This issue is basically an introduction to the cast Ultimate Comics: Avengers will be working with for a little while, and what a cast it is! Millar created a powder keg waiting to do the inevitable. Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, has an older brother who is the very definition of amoral and his team of operatives for Fury are just brimming with potential to screw things up. There is a Hulk who will keep his intelligence in a shocking panel of him laid out with his skull sawed off, a character dressed like Spider-Man who can talk people into suicide in just a few conversations, but I don’t think that is his superpower, and an Iron Man knock-off with just a touch of Transformer. There is also replacements for Wasp and Black Widow, one a controlled supervillain and the other still having some mystery around her. Of course, one of the best parts of this new team is Millar returning to Hawkeye. Millar left Ultimates completely destroying Hawkeye emotionally and, unfortunately, left Jeph Loeb to handle his grief. Needless to say, the handling of Hawkeye’s grief was very shallow and unimpressive, but now that Millar’s back, seeing Hawkeye up to his usual black-ops self is going to be quite a ride. And without those nasty cliches of what a superhero should be on the inside, Ultimates is poised to come back and kick some ass while beating the very genre Millar is working in. There is beating too, with a good brawl sequence featuring Captain America in some very, very cool action, but let’s save that for comments on the art, shall we? One more point on Millar’s story, the beginning also hails to the continued return of a more politicized version of the Ultimates, which I discuss in an article on this site called “Should the Ultimates Have Saved America” (link below in "Related Articles"). Millar is continuing to question the legitimacy of America’s colonialism, and looks at war crimes commited by Americans in these issues in direct relation to what has now turned into the war in Iraq, but let's just wait to see where that goes next.
As for the art, while I appreciate penciller Carlos Pachero’s ability, I feel the art is too clean and polished for a book which emphasizes the fringes. And I appreciate his ability, I feel this problem lies more with the colouring and inking than just simply the pencils. The last seven pages are jaw dropping, with Pachelo making Captain America into the most bad-ass fighter in the entire Ultimate line. Captain America has a reckless abandon which works to put every single one of his opponents off-guard, and Hawkeye has been on the receiving end of this twice in a row now. The other pages feature crisp lines and bright colours which I don’t associate with the rough nature of the title. But this art is amazing despite it contradicting Millar’s writing, and this book becomes an act of watching rather than reading in the last pages and gives the feeling that the speech bubbles and captions are simply in the way of watching one epic fight unfold.
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