I have Bendis & Bags’ signatures on USM 1, them and Stuart on USM 111, and Bendis and Stuart on USM 112. Seemed like the right thing to do. Does getting these signed without paying some CGC vulture to watch and verify it, and then not cramming them in a plastic shell lower the value? I mean, probably, but who cares? Who’s that in the background? Kinda hard to believe it’s been over 50 issues since we saw Norman. I appreciate Bendis having restraint on that. Starting this month, Stuart Immonen is inked by his longtime partner Wade Von Grawbadger, whose name is very fun. Justin Ponsor hangs in on colors. Now that he’s gotten to do a Spidey flashback thing, time to see what Stuart Immonen can do on a full issue. By this point in his career, he’s come a long way from Spider-Man/Gen13. He drew the instant classic Superman: Secret Identity, among other things, and he’s just come off a long run on Ultimate X-Men with Brian K. Vaughan, which I think considerably raised his profile. By the time he’s done with USM, he’ll be one of Marvels’ top artists. And how else would we begin his run on the book than with…
…the Shocker. This bit is less funny when you read the comics closer together, I gotta say.
I mean, are you kidding? Wow! Immonen draws some of the most kinetic action in comics history. His stuff just leaps off the page! Car chase stuff is so hard to make exciting in comics, and here he goes, right out of the gate. Almost showing off, is what it is. And he gets better! Kitty reminds Spider-Man how her powers work, and says her Mom works nearby. And she’s not happy with Spider-Man still, I mean, obviously, and he tries to hash it out right there with the cops advancing on them, but Kitty, being the smarter one, is not gonna do that, so they part ways. Momentarily, anyway, as they both have to go to school. Suddenly, we’re back in that Oscorp lab, and MJ is a big hairy monster, much bigger than last time, who’s about to eat Spider-Man, but it’s not real, of course.
What is with all the Love Boat references lately? It’s the late 2000s!!! Immonen’s teens look like teens, and his characters have a real life in their eyes. He’s really one of the all-timers for me. Well, the teacher is assigning the kids baby dolls to care for as if they were real kids. And she has split them into non-negotiable couples, and guess what, Peter and Kitty are teamed up. She says they have to feed and care for the kid, and the kid can never leave their side (How does that work if the couples don’t live together?). No one seems happy with this. Meanwhile, at the Triskelion, Captain Danvers is being briefed in a walk & talk. Ultimate Carol Danvers, I forgot about her. I don’t know where she was introduced. Maybe here. Oh, ok, she was in Warren Ellis’ pretty disappointing Ultimate Galactus trilogy, 3 miniseries with different artists that eventually revealed Ultimate Galactus to be a swarm of space bugs. Not a homerun, pretty savagely made fun of for, well, the whole time after. The main thing I remember about the trilogy is Brandon Peterson pretty shamelessly tracing a bunch of Poser models for some crowd scenes. Like, they were very unconvincing, and he only posed like 5 of them and then just copied them over and over, so it stuck out so bad, the same poses repeating. Well, this isn’t about that. The Triskelion is all messed up, and a guy is telling Carol they’re going to have to move the super baddies somewhere else, and one of them is demanding to talk to Nick Fury, who is not available.
Then and now, this feels too much like Ultimate Six. “I just want my boy” is literally his angle from that. Is he actually talking about Harry now, or still Peter? One assumes we will find out. That’s a good bit with Carol, tho. I don’t remember why Fury isn’t here. Is he off the table or just busy? I don’t know.Maybe I didn’t know then, either. The Ultimate line only having 4 titles would make it pretty easy to stay on top of things if I was actually reading more than one of them. I’d been picking up UXM for BKV and Immonen, but that’s over.
Heeeey, Kong! He’s been trying so hard to be a good person all these issues, and look at that. I like his evolution. I like that he routinely revealed himself to be a decent guy who went along with a bad crowd. He seemed like maybe he’d be ok so many times, only to fall back into his old ways. Has he turned over a new leaf, finally? We’ll see! But, over in the Triskelion, Captain Danvers is pretty reasonably freaking out about how unsafe it is to keep so many super-nuts in the basement when the lights go out in Osborn’s cell, and then a huge explosion rocks the building as we’re To Be Continued. So Kong’s redemption may not be getting as much screen time in the near future. But, there you have it, USM’s 2nd artist in full force. It’s a bold new era!