This month, Team-Up welcomes Iron Man and Mike Allred to the Ultimate party. “JC” hangs in there on colors. I really wonder why he didn’t go by his name. Because this series is trying to introduce whole new versions of familiar characters in very brief stories, it’s no surprise Bendis starts this one with Peter Parker giving a presentation on the life & career of Tony Stark, who he says “practically invented the term ‘self-made billionaire,” so we can get a quick primer on who we’re dealing with.
Spoilers: This Tony absolutely did not know Reed Richards in college. Honestly, Ultimate FF is so unnecessarily messy.
Allred openly just using the actual old Iron Man armors is interesting. Ultimate comics will develop such a reputation for doing things differently, but in these early days, no one really knew what their mission statement was, and they were flying by the seat of their pants a lot.
Rumor had it Tom Cruise was going to star in the long-in-development Iron Man movie at this time. Its interesting to remove Tony’s dad from the story, since he’s such a big presence in the original version’s life. I’m pretty sure some, most or all of this backstory was thrown out by noted bigot Orson Scott Card when he later got to do an Ultimate Iron Man comic despite being a noted bigot. Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas were really, really desperate for validation, and would work with seemingly any writer who didn’t make comics in what seemed a desire to make comics seem more mainstream. It was always funny to me that they’d be like “From a writer on some TV show!” as if that would bring the public flocking to comic shops, but I mean, ya gotta try things. And Joe Q got Kevin Smith for DD back in Marvel Knights, and they got Card, and they got a few other people from outside the industry to give comics a try, with wildly uneven results. I didn’t know anything about Orson Scott Card when his Iron Man comic came out. All I knew was I bought it and it was terrible. His Tony Stark was, like, raised in a lab, in a tube, or something? Covered in blue goop that kept him alive or something? It was insane. Then I found out he’s an awful person from people debating whether he should’ve been allowed to work on it and wished I hadn’t bought them. Anyway, Allred sure made Iron Man creepy in that 3rd panel! Peter says Stark’s refusal to sell his tech is why he admires him, and then a school official comes on stage and says Peter has been chosen to represent their school at a science expo at the UN as a guest of Stark International. The crowd of his peers absolutely does not care. Iron Man at science expo, huh? I feel like I’ve seen that movie. Anyway, we cut to Tony Stark, in the flesh, rebuffing the advances of the cartoonishly bad guy-looking “Mr. Golog,” a representative of the Latverian government, here to try to buy the Irontech we were just told Stark would never sell. And he isn’t. He says he only took this meeting because the president asked him to. Golog says they’ve made him a generous offer, but Tony isn’t listening.
Panel 4 there is really fun. Golgo is really a Kirby-style “this guy works for the bad guys’ character design.
At least Tony didn’t outright say Doom runs Latveria, that only would’ve made things worse eventually. At some point, I’ll have to explain Ultimate FF, but it’s way in the future, and I don’t think Spider-Man’s in a single issue, so it’s not like I need to any time soon. Jim Rhodes, Tony’s right-hand man in any universe, it would seem, wonders aloud if he’ll regret that after Golog leaves. Tony dismisses the situation, sees Spider-Man swing by the window (“Now there’s something you don’t see every day”), and then has some kind of episode, for which Jim runs off to find a doctor over Tony’s protests. A real crash course on this character, and not a bad way to introduce him. We follow Spider-Man, swinging along, kind of explaining who he is in case this is your first issue, then dropping into an alley to become Peter Parker, on his way to the aforementioned science expo, which he is awed by before he even gets inside.
Oh, look, the rocket the FF absolutely did not go into space and get their powers in. Man. This is actually worse than I remember, all the references they eventually retconned. Peter goes to the demo, where fake Iron Man armors do some impressive things as a girl in a sort of Iron Man-showgirl costume explains Iron Man facts (Feel like she inspired the girls at the movie expo, too). Tony Stark arrives, still looking a little shaky, just in time for Peter’s danger sense to go off. An explosion rocks the stage. Rhodey starts trying to get Tony out of there and PEter is looking unsure of what to do as…
That first panel is like something out of 2000s Adult Swim show Frisky Dingo. Of all the things to get into the Ultimate U early, “Mandroid Armor” would not have been on my bingo card. I think we’ve seen Mandroids on this blog, maybe? Well, in the real comics, it’s off-brand Iron Man suits. Speaking of Iron Man…
Such a distinctly Mike Allred Iron Man. The lil’ antenna on his ears! I ron Man tells everyone to flee, then flies up to meet the attackers, telling them to drop their weapons and that no weapon on Earth can penetrate his armor.
Looks bad! Hope Tony makes it out of next issue alive! This issue features this series’ first letter page. The missives are mostly positive, but one writer, who says the series is enjoyable, also says it’s a bad idea. He points out that introducing the Ultimate versions of Marvel characters in these quick sketches can’t possibly be as enjoyable as Ultimate Spider-Man or Ultimate X-Men, and questions having one writer do so many characters (Which, while fair, is very funny given how much of the Marvel faithful have traditionally rolled with the idea that Stan Lee thought up everything all by himself). I think these are very fair points. UMTU seems like something you’d do 5 years in, not as series #3. The amount of material in this series that gets retconned or outright ignored later would seem to bear that out. But, what do I know?