David Blue
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2005
- Messages
- 228
OK, all of that makes good sense to me. I'm glad you enjoyed the series.Pandrio said:
How would you rate Ultimate Nightmare overall?
- Thread starter E
- Start date
Ultimate Iron Moose!
Member
I downloaded it and read it without a single preconceived notion of the characters or situation. I was just killing time.
When the book started, we had a mystery. We saw two parties assemble groups to investigate, and we saw the mystery get weirder and weirder until it all made sense.
And then the Vision spoke "gah. lak. tus", and I bolted upright in my seat, thinking something pretty much limited to "...the poop is hitting the fan. Time's up. "
This series made me start buying the comics. Impending doom and reactions to it are interesting things to follow.
The reason I was OK with The Ultimate Skeleton Crew taking out the X-Men as easily as they did was not only because of Wolverine's rant at the end about how they were amateurs, but because the X-Men had more to lose. If Falcon kills Colossus - and I agree with the poster saying "CLOSE YOUR EYES, FOOL" - nothing much happens. Miitary engagement gone south. If any of the X-Men do anything permanent to Fury, Widow, Cap et al, the full weight of SHIELD comes crashing down on them. More than enough reason to pull punches.
When the book started, we had a mystery. We saw two parties assemble groups to investigate, and we saw the mystery get weirder and weirder until it all made sense.
And then the Vision spoke "gah. lak. tus", and I bolted upright in my seat, thinking something pretty much limited to "...the poop is hitting the fan. Time's up. "
This series made me start buying the comics. Impending doom and reactions to it are interesting things to follow.
The reason I was OK with The Ultimate Skeleton Crew taking out the X-Men as easily as they did was not only because of Wolverine's rant at the end about how they were amateurs, but because the X-Men had more to lose. If Falcon kills Colossus - and I agree with the poster saying "CLOSE YOUR EYES, FOOL" - nothing much happens. Miitary engagement gone south. If any of the X-Men do anything permanent to Fury, Widow, Cap et al, the full weight of SHIELD comes crashing down on them. More than enough reason to pull punches.
thee great one
Master of TOG-fu.
Ultimate Iron Moose! said:
That's a awesome review.
Welcome Moose dude.
TheManWithoutFear
#1 reason not to join UC
Did anyone get the new Handbook this week? Because it makes me think that the guy stuck in the bunker that Cap rumbled with was an ultimization of Protocide.
Fredrik Martinsson
Formerly known as Ultimate Warrior
I read it and you may be quite right. I THINK I have heard it mentioned somewhere else but I can't for the life of me remember where :?TheManWithoutFear said:
Re: Ultimate Nightmare #5 discussion (spoilers)
I bought this on Comixology last night. The issues are on sale for 99 cents. Back when this came out there was so much to talk about and speculate about (any maybe because we were so wide-eyed and naive) that we didn't have threads for miniseries. We had threads for individual issues. Sometimes more than one. So I guess I'll make my comments in this thread.
It's been a while since I've read this, and I had forgotten how good it was. I said a while back (might have been on Twitter) that I thought that Warren Ellis and, to a slightly lesser degree, Mark Millar were the writers who best handled the concept of Ultimate-izing characters, which is to say not just retelling stories but re-imagining characters so completely in more "realistic" circumstances that they almost become something new. That's what drew me back into comics! It was Ultimates, specifically, but Ultimate Nightmare was an incredible continuation of that.
The mystery and horror in this series is unparalleled for a Marvel comic. Jeez...I can remember the excitement waiting for these issues and how we speculated and went over what we'd read over and over. It's not that there aren't good books out now, but what book is there that made us excited about comics like this and Ultimates did? I don't think there is one. Proj and I were talking about this on Twitter a few days ago...I miss how good these comics were and how exciting it was to talk about them.
There are so many lines in this book that did such a good job at putting you in the story and making you feel what the characters feel. Jean's line about a mutant baby growing up in that place, Sam Wilson's lines about machinery and drug machines people ride to communicate with the dead. So brilliant. Even smaller stuff like Sam's "Black Widow...do I have to call you that?" That line is such a perfect deconstruction of traditional Marvel, forcing it (and us!) to grow up.
I just don't know if you can re-introduce a character as well as they did Ultimate Vision. How brilliant is this: he (Ellis) turns Vision into a messenger warning civilization of imminent death from a force they have no hope of stopping (which in turn is a re-imagining of a significant - but ultimately incredibly goofy, let's admit it - existing character made much more terrifying...and we don't even know to what extent yet!), and tie this into a real-world event (the "Tunguska event" - look it up because it's fascinating), use it to kick start an entire subsection of secondary characters that, based on their original counterparts, don't deserve much more than a few pages of face time but nonetheless make a huge mark on the book and are horrifying enough to leave a significant impression, then ties all of this even further into more real-world events (specifically, Russian intelligence and its relationship to the fall of Communism). Each character has his/her own voice and is handled wonderfully in the way they react to all of this and put the pieces together to figure out what's going on. The X-Men's failure on every level is pretty spectacular, and the ending isn't happy for anyone. Cap had to kill a guy, Sam has to figure out how to save the world, and everyone learned dark and disgusting secrets about things they couldn't have even dreamed of NOT wanting to know about.
I wish I had the creative capacity that Ellis has, and had when he was imagining the horrors of this underground facility and what would go on with these monsters locked up and left on their own, having been dissected and having alien robot parts grafted onto them to give them powers, all because the Russians were afraid of Captain America. I just got a chill up my spine.
I love this so much. Ultimates was entertaining, but this was so wonderfully written that at this particular moment, right now, I love it more.
I miss comics like this.
I bought this on Comixology last night. The issues are on sale for 99 cents. Back when this came out there was so much to talk about and speculate about (any maybe because we were so wide-eyed and naive) that we didn't have threads for miniseries. We had threads for individual issues. Sometimes more than one. So I guess I'll make my comments in this thread.
It's been a while since I've read this, and I had forgotten how good it was. I said a while back (might have been on Twitter) that I thought that Warren Ellis and, to a slightly lesser degree, Mark Millar were the writers who best handled the concept of Ultimate-izing characters, which is to say not just retelling stories but re-imagining characters so completely in more "realistic" circumstances that they almost become something new. That's what drew me back into comics! It was Ultimates, specifically, but Ultimate Nightmare was an incredible continuation of that.
The mystery and horror in this series is unparalleled for a Marvel comic. Jeez...I can remember the excitement waiting for these issues and how we speculated and went over what we'd read over and over. It's not that there aren't good books out now, but what book is there that made us excited about comics like this and Ultimates did? I don't think there is one. Proj and I were talking about this on Twitter a few days ago...I miss how good these comics were and how exciting it was to talk about them.
There are so many lines in this book that did such a good job at putting you in the story and making you feel what the characters feel. Jean's line about a mutant baby growing up in that place, Sam Wilson's lines about machinery and drug machines people ride to communicate with the dead. So brilliant. Even smaller stuff like Sam's "Black Widow...do I have to call you that?" That line is such a perfect deconstruction of traditional Marvel, forcing it (and us!) to grow up.
I just don't know if you can re-introduce a character as well as they did Ultimate Vision. How brilliant is this: he (Ellis) turns Vision into a messenger warning civilization of imminent death from a force they have no hope of stopping (which in turn is a re-imagining of a significant - but ultimately incredibly goofy, let's admit it - existing character made much more terrifying...and we don't even know to what extent yet!), and tie this into a real-world event (the "Tunguska event" - look it up because it's fascinating), use it to kick start an entire subsection of secondary characters that, based on their original counterparts, don't deserve much more than a few pages of face time but nonetheless make a huge mark on the book and are horrifying enough to leave a significant impression, then ties all of this even further into more real-world events (specifically, Russian intelligence and its relationship to the fall of Communism). Each character has his/her own voice and is handled wonderfully in the way they react to all of this and put the pieces together to figure out what's going on. The X-Men's failure on every level is pretty spectacular, and the ending isn't happy for anyone. Cap had to kill a guy, Sam has to figure out how to save the world, and everyone learned dark and disgusting secrets about things they couldn't have even dreamed of NOT wanting to know about.
I wish I had the creative capacity that Ellis has, and had when he was imagining the horrors of this underground facility and what would go on with these monsters locked up and left on their own, having been dissected and having alien robot parts grafted onto them to give them powers, all because the Russians were afraid of Captain America. I just got a chill up my spine.
I love this so much. Ultimates was entertaining, but this was so wonderfully written that at this particular moment, right now, I love it more.
I miss comics like this.
