Now that we’ve had Stuart Immonen show that he’s more than capable of filling Bagley’s shoes, it’s time for the rarest thing in the Ultimate Spider-World for me: Something I haven’t read. Ultimate Power is a crossover between the Ultimate line and J. Michael Straczynski’s Supreme Power, a dark and edgy Squadron Supreme reimagining. Which started with the Max line, the adult stuff, so crossing it over with the Ultimate line seems a strange choice, but I think it also came out of Max eventually. At any rate, it’s a 9-issue crossover cooked up by JMS, Bendis and then-Ultimates writer Jeph Loeb. Each of them wrote 3 issues. What’s crucial here are 4 things:
- I read some of Supreme Power and bailed because it wasn’t very good.
- JMS was not exactly my favorite guy after the last 40-odd issues of his ASM run.
- Jeph Loeb, once a well-respected writer, was at this time making waves for just doing terrible, ludicrous things, one after another, and his Ultimates 3 in particular was one of the most reviled launches of its time, so wretched even art by the rarely-working-in-comics Joe Madureira wasn’t enough to make people happy. I did not buy it, but its reputation precedes it.
- This entire crossover is traced by Greg Land, the biggest hack in comics.
I didn’t want to buy comics by JMS, Loeb, and Land. Bendis only wrote 3 of them. And I had no way of knowing how prominent Spider-Man would be in them, but I couldn’t imagine anything too important to USM would happen in this crossover. So I balked. They remain the only comic books featuring Ultimate Peter Parker I don’t own physical copies of (Almost? I think?). And, despite all the outright trash I bought in the course of this blog, it didn’t even occur to me to buy these. I, in fact, forgot they exist. Til a friend of mine, also re-reading USM, got to this point, well ahead of me, and he read them, and he put the idea in my head. And so… Here we are. My expectations are rrrrrrrrock bottom. Bendis writes the first 3 issues, so it’s all downhill after that, and the book will look like crap the whole time. Excited? Oh boy.
Look at that abomination of a cover. Much has been said about it since it was published. This one is particularly notorious in the legacy of Greg Land’s tracing career, because in addition to the usual assortment of celebrities, wrestlers, models and porn stars he keeps on hand, this was the first time he was caught stealing from a fellow artist (Though surely not the first time he did it). Travis Charest drew most of that Spider-Man, and Land just copied it.
This cover is also another fine example of Land recycling his own tracings
And of course, as pointed out, there’s Kate Beckinsale there in the red bustier as… somebody. Ultimate Scarlet Witch maybe? One thing’s for sure, whoever she is, she’ll be traced from pictures of several very different women over the course of this series, like every other character. The laziness confounds me. Like, Deodato making Tommy Lee Jones “play” Norman Osborn, or Salvador LaRocca making the Lost guy “play” Tony Stark or Bryan Hitch making Samuel L. Jackson “play” Nick Fury is distracting, but at least it’s consistent. Land just copied any random clipping of a celeb that sort-of-almost-maybe-often-not-really-at-all fit the needs of the panel. A tremendous contempt for his collaborators and his readers. But his readers don’t actually care about comic art by and large by 2008, and his collaborators work in an industry so small you can’t say anything bad about anyone, so he’s just kept on keepin’ on. He’s tracin’ away on a Spider-Man project as I type this in 2024 (And boy, would it be bad whether he was involved or not, but that’s for many years from now). His art has somehow gotten uglier as his tracing has gotten harder to source. He might even be actually drawing some of his work now, and yet it’s never been worse. A hero for the ages. AT ANY RATE, Land is joined here by inker Matt Ryan and colorist Justin Ponsor.
Everyone looking in a different direction. That one lady’s surprised face obviously not the right choice. We’re off.
I can’t keep doing this because these posts would take the rest of my life, but Land’s laziness has been so throughly documented over the years that I see pictures and remember the comparisons.
What a pro. Real artists don’t get hired by Marvel every day, and this guy has a long and profitable career. I can barely read the comic for just looking at all the tracing. And, like, it actively makes the drawing worse. Look at the texture of Sue’s hair! It looks like spaghetti noodles! Her weird little leg… Ugh. I really can’t keep doing this, I have other things to do. Well, the FF beat up the Serpent Society, who are yammering about how “they” stole the Serpent Crown from them, and only one of whom, Black Mamba, is even named. Bendis is kind of matching the energy of the art in this so far, it’s not exactly his best. Then, when the fight’s over…
Where’s he getting his Things? How many people did he trace? Or did he actually draw some of them? Don’t go out of your way or anything. Despite the fact that it appears Ben got hit really hard, there’s no assailant, and no one seems to be acting like he was attacked. What happened? If only an artist could have drawn it for us. Reed collects Ben’s missing chunk and Ben worries he’s breaking apart when SHIELD agent Wendell Vaughn (The last “a” is missing), the ultimate version of Quasar, comes up and thanks the FF for their help.
“The Gruenwald Doctrine” is a nice tribute to Marvel’s late continuity champion, Mark Gruenwald, creator of Quasar.
Poor Ben. Cut to Reed up all night, trying as he often does to find a way to cure Ben, flashing back to promising to do so and Ben having no faith, before Reed begins to rage at his Negative Zone portal about his inability to fix his friend (In the Ultimate Universe, the gang discovered the Negative Zone and got their powers exploring it). He throws a chair and it breaks and like a ball… a ball bearing?… on the ground catches Reed’s attention, but I’m not totally sure what happened.
Ultimate Nick Fury canonically looks like Samuel L. Jackson. It has been remarked upon in Ultimates comics wherein Bryan Hitch traced pictures of Jackson as Fury. And now Mr. Tracey gets to draw Fury, and he doesn’t use Samuel L. Jackson. He sucks so bad.
So, this, obviously, takes place before the USMs we just looked at, but I originally had no plans to cover this, and then once I decided to, I’ll be damned if I started this block with this ugly garbage, so it goes where it goes. Well, over the next several pages, Reed launches 5 of those things into other dimensions, anyway, and the next day, the FF are looking at some proposed action figures of themselves when an explosion interrupts them. And I guess blows the whole top of the building off, but as rendered by Greg Land, there’s just a bunch of unrelated traced debris on a blank background, so it’s genuinely hard to tell what happened. This guy is a popular artist! People love him! Sue raises a force field, and…
The cast of Supreme Power, ladies & gentlemen. Sort of an Ultimate take on the Squadron Supreme, they themselves variations on the Justice League. What a convoluted situation! I barely remember this book, so I don’t even know if they all have the same super-names as the Squadron, but there’s a Superman, a Batman (Who is Nighthawk, the original version of whom we’ve seen before on the blog), a Wonder Woman, a Flash, a Green Lantern, etc. and a lot more besides, it looks like. Maybe they’ll get introduced next issue, but no one bothered to name most of the Serpent ladies so who knows. And the writing can only get worse after issue 3! And is Spider-Man gonna show up soon? He was on the cover. I heard he winds up playing a significant role. I guess we’ll see how many posts I waste on this. Maybe if he’s not in #2, I’ll start condensing them.