{"id":22978,"date":"2024-10-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=22978"},"modified":"2024-02-21T16:42:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T20:42:08","slug":"utmu-09","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/10\/07\/utmu-09\/","title":{"rendered":"UTMU 09"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Of all the artists featured in this book so far, Jim Mahfood is by far the most radical choice. A fixture of the indie world at the time, doing comics a lot closer to the \u201cunderground comix\u201d world of days past, Mahfood\u2019s work often got called \u201chip hop comics.\u201d With a rough, angular cartooning style, he is about as far from the Marvel aesthetic as you could get, and here he is. It\u2019s pretty wild that Marvel signed off on this. This one\u2019s colored by Transparency Digital rather than ol\u2019 reliable JC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter\u2019s day is off to a stressful start!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As you can tell, we\u2019re having fun here. The robot is HERBIE, who replaced the Human Torch in an old FF cartoon, allegedly due to producers worrying he would inspire kids to set themselves on fire, a rumor that I think has been largely debunked. But people have loved throwing HERBIE into FF stories as a gag over the years. Some might say too much! But this is a pretty early example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sue also being a scientist would later get retconned into the main continuity by Matt Fraction in\u2026 like 2012 or something, I can\u2019t quite remember. It felt like a pretty wild swing to suddenly say she had always been a scientist the whole time, but whatever, it\u2019s nice that she finally got to be more than a super-housewife. Don\u2019t get too attached to anything about this FF, tho. Anyway, Patsy, who, yes, will continue to show up in videos like this, goes on to say they all got their powers, they split their time as \u201cWorld Peace officers\u201d and scientists in the Baxter Building, and they have a special deal with Uncle Sam. Peter is warned not to go to the 3rd floor, as that\u2019s where the Negative Zone portal is, and then is let into the floor the FF are on. They\u2019re in the middle of typical Jack Kirby giant super science experiment, complete with the Thing holding some giant piece of machinery for no obvious reason, but this is a comedy issue, so it\u2019s Reed trying to make \u201can ultimate coffee maker.\u201d They go about their business for a 2-page spread of wackiness before noticing Peter has arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s all gags this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter\u2019s grumbling is interrupted by the FF\u2019s security system, since he\u2019s gone off the path. He has, in fact, stumbled into the Negative Zone portal area he was specifically told not to go to, and in the ensuing fracas, that portal is accidentally opened, spilling out an army of Skulls carrying laser weapons, regular weapons, comics, a boombox and a burrito as their leader yells for them to bring him the head of Reed Richards. They run by Peter without noticing him as they blow a hole in the wall and begin the chaos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s fun how cool Spider-Man looks in Mahfood\u2019s style. Bendis loves Howard Stern, or at least he did at this point, I don\u2019t know, maybe he doesn\u2019t now. The next page begins a pretty funny sequence with a joke that feels RADICALLY different now than it did when published:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I mean, that\u2019s way funnier now. Perhaps worth nothing that, out of all the names Mahfood crammed in the background there, Richard Donner eventually did write a little Superman, indie cartoonist Scott Morse did end up doing some Marvel stuff, and the Wachowskis actually wrote some stuff for a Marvel-produced line of Clive Barker comics, where they worked with Steve Skroce, which eventually led to him working on the Matrix, but I probably babbled about that elsewhere. Mahfood was likely the only person who\u2019d name check Iceberg Slim in a Marvel comic at this period. Maybe the only one who knew who that was. Things only get wackier and more filled with background jokes\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Marvel\u2019s breakout character of 2001, a satisfying falafel wrap. The chaos and jokes continues until the FF show up, with a gadget that can zap all the Skrulls back to the Negative Zone, but not before they can quote Superman the Movie and then Reed can make fun of Bendis for putting that in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That silent issue thing was not a joke. But we\u2019ll get there, too. This issue would eventually be declared non-canon, a bold and pretty rare move in Marvel history. In 2004, as Bendis had had continued success on USM, as Mark Millar had had acclaim on UXM and the Ultimates, they team up to launch Ultimate Fantastic Four. And they will make the baffling, terrible decision to make all of them teenagers who get their powers from experiments involving other dimensions. They will make it as impossible as possible for all the FF references in the Ultimate U to date to have happened. For some reason. To this day, I can\u2019t imagine why they did that. Anyone can tell you FF is about family. If they\u2019re all teens, that goes right out the window. It was the farthest any Ultimate property had yet strayed from its inspiration by a mile, and was not well received. It was the line\u2019s first big mistake. Bendis and Millar launched the book with Adam Kubert, then turned it over to Warren Ellis after their first arc, with Kubert staying on. This seemed like a good thing to me, as Ellis is much more of a hard scifi guy, and I figured he\u2019d be able to whip the book into shape. Instead, he created just about the worst Dr. Doom you could come up with and left after 2 arcs. Then Millar came back and, in one of his beloved shock twists, made it seem like the Ultimate FF was going to meet the real FF, only for them to wind up in an alternate reality that introduced the Marvel Zombies, a pretty dumb thing based entirely on a pun that has had shocking legs over the years. And so on. Millar hung in there into the early 30s with famous tracer Greg Land, ensuring I wouldn\u2019t buy the book, and then Mike Carey and a variety of artists did their best as they rode the series to its cancellation in 2008, the first Ultimate title to sputter out. And I think that has a lot to do with how poor the foundation was. But, at any rate, it also renders everything that happened in this issue null. An \u201cimaginary story,\u201d as DC used to call things set outside continuity. And, you know, there may have been some change of heart after everyone took a breath and realized this was how they introduced the FF. It\u2019s a fun and funny issue, but\u2026 maybe not the intro they deserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of all the artists featured in this book so far, Jim Mahfood is by far the most radical choice. A fixture of the indie world at the time, doing comics a lot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864,1],"tags":[1922,288,72,1957,247,2,1710,663,1956,1928],"class_list":["post-22978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","category-uncategorized","tag-brian-michael-bendis","tag-fantastic-four","tag-human-torch","tag-jim-mahfood","tag-reed-richards","tag-spider-man","tag-sue-storm","tag-the-thing","tag-transparency-digital","tag-ultimate-marvel-team-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22992,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22978\/revisions\/22992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}