Ultimate Human is the latest in the seemingly endless stream of Ultimate Universe spin-off miniseries.  This time, it's Warren Ellis and Cary Nord telling a story about Iron Man and the Hulk.

Now, this is not a particularly major release by any stretch of the imagination.  As I've mentioned before, the Ultimate imprint is in the doldrums.  I haven't seen a great deal of advance promotion for this book.  And the recent Ultimate miniseries have been a forgettable bunch.  But it's a quiet week, and Warren Ellis is taking over Astonishing X-Men in the course of the year, so what the heck.

There's actually a solid concept in here.  Iron Man and the Hulk represent two different approaches to "improving" on humanity.  Iron Man is the technologically enhanced man, with sleek little gadgets and so forth.  The Hulk is an attempt to mess about with DNA, and although he's gone horribly wrong in terms of the desired result, he's still pretty impressive in his own way.  Banner wants Iron Man to cure him, but as you'd expect, they're being manipulated by a villain, and it's all going to go horribly wrong.

The upgrading of human beings has been a pet theme of Ellis' for a while now.  It was the focal point of his revamp of Iron Man, and it's natural that he would home in on it here.

However, at the same time, you couldn't say this was a serious attempt to get into the subject.  It's just a pet theme on which Ellis has chosen to hang a relatively straightforward story.  I recall Ellis, a few years ago, sarcastically observing that people complained when The Authority paused long enough to explain the plot.  And in that series, the plot was indeed kept to the bare minimum of context necessary to make the action sequences cool.

This story works on similar lines.  The plot is remarkably minimal.  Bruce Banner walks into Tony's office one day and suggests that they try to cure him, so they do.  A villain crops up for a few pages of exposition in the middle, but basically, that's the entire story.  Bruce shows up, says "Let's do this," and then they spend the rest of the issue trying to do it.  The whole thing is done in three-panel pages (except for the bad guy, who gets a six-panel grid).

A story like that stands and falls on the details.  And indeed, they're pretty good.  Ellis has always had a nice turn of phrase.  Although he has a tendency to slip into writing stock personas, he doesn't do so here, perhaps because he's working with Mark Millar's versions of Hulk and Iron Man.  Not that he's very interested in any of their quirks, mind you - frankly, he's writing a story that feels like it was designed for the mainstream Marvel Universe characters.  But at least they've got strong established voices that he has to give lip service to.

Cary Nord's art is expressive and makes good use of the space.  His Banner is suitably downtrodden without becoming the figure of ridicule that he tended to end up as in Ultimates.  Colourist Dave Stewart also does an excellent job, managing to be subdued and somewhat atmospheric without falling into the trap of becoming murky.  These guys really deserve to be working on a higher-profile book.

It's a very simple and straightforward comic, but what it does, it does very well.  A better issue than I was expecting. 

Rating: A-

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