I was taken a little by surprised when Ultimates 3 #1 appeared on the shelf this week.  I didn't recall seeing the usual barrage of promotional art and advance pages on the news websites.

Perhaps I missed them.  It's been a busy week.  But perhaps Marvel just decided not to bother with them.  If so, I can see why.

When Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira were announced as the creative team for Ultimates 3, it made a certain degree of sense.  Of course, the idea that Madureira would actually produce the issues on any sort of reasonable timescale seemed questionable at best.  But Loeb is an experienced writer of superhero comics, who should, at least in theory, know how to handle an epic team book.  And Madureira is a big name artist with an over-the-top style that would suit the kind of book.

It didn't sound like the sort of book I'd be interested in reading.  But it did sound like the sort of book lots of other fans would be interested in reading, which was fair enough.

What they have actually produced, though, is a train wreck.  Granted, it isn't a disaster on the scale of Loeb's abominable recent Wolverine story, "Evolution."  But it's a clumsy, clueless, heavy handed book with ugly art and spastic pacing, which fails to deliver on almost every conceivable level.

Now, Ultimates wasn't exactly subtle when Mark Millar was writing it.  But at least there was such a thing as subtext.  Hinting that Wanda and Pietro were having an incestuous relationship was childish, but at least Millar left it as a background element.  And he had some sort of aspirations to political allegory, even if the politics were hazily thought out.  If nothing else, Millar at least had a distinctive voice, and some sort of point in mind.

Loeb gives us an issue of random fighting interspersed with characters shouting the plot to one another.  He's joined the story in mid-stream, which at least goes some way towards excusing its incoherence.  But character interaction is virtually non-existent, and the whole thing reads like somebody who's taken Millar's amoral, unsympathetic characters and tried to hammer them, at face value, into a bog standard superhero comics from 1993 - without even writing it particularly well.  Characters appear, shout something, and move on.  That's about it.

The book might have got away it, if the art had been strong enough.  Unfortunately, the art is a total mess.  In fairness, Madureira only deserves some of the blame for that.  His storytelling isn't always clear, and some of his action scenes are ridiculous.  There's a nonsensical splash page of the Black Panther fighting Venom, in which the Panther is leaping out of the page towards us with fist outstretched, while Venom is standing behind him reacting to a punch which, from the look of it, missed him by five metres.  It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that the figures don't relate to one another in any way, shape or form.  But there are sequences which could have worked.

The more fundamental problem is Christian Lichtner's colouring, which drowns the entire issue in low-light murk.  This is an absurd choice.  Madureira's strengths as a superhero artist lay in bold lines and bright, strong colours.  The colouring here removes all of that, leaving nothing but mud and haze.  It's incredibly misconceived, and seems to have completely missed the point.  Nobody ever bought a Joe Madureira comic for the moody atmospherics.

Reading this issue, I couldn't help imagining people in the Marvel offices gathering around the pages in horrified silence, with a clock ticking ominously in the background.  They must know.  They surely can't have deluded themselves into thinking this is any good.

Ultimates 3 is bad, very bad.  I'd go so far as to say it's shockingly incompetent.  Even after suffering through "Evolution", I was still prepared to regard that as a weird anomaly from an experienced writer.  I read this thing, and then I sat there in silent disbelief. 

Will this translate into poor sales?  Not in the short term.  I suspect readers will suffer grumpily through the five-issue miniseries and then abandon the book before Ultimates 4.  But if the rest of the series is like this, I think they will indeed leave in droves when that break point comes around.

This really isn't good enough, however you look at it. 

(Postscript: My attention has been drawn to Christian Lichtner's blog, where he's plainly horrified at how dark the issue looks, and says that he's trying to get it fixed for the second printing.  I still don't feel that digital painting is the right approach to take with Madureira, but it's only fair to acknowledge that Lichtner didn't intend it to look this murky.)

Rating: D

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