Bass, I find your lack of faith in Mark Millar disturbing.
Millar > Bendis > Loeb
Don't put an equal sign anywhere in that equation, ever.
Millar > Bendis > Loeb =============
How do you like that, Willverine? Huh? HUH!?
Meh. I hate hate hate hate hate the idea of Fury as a super soldier. Hate it.
Me too.
It's as stupid as explaining Tony being smart because of nanomonkeys/being a living brain.
It's not THAT stupid.
I loved that scene. I think this fury revelation brought in elements of the infinity formula AND the Tuskegee take of Captain America: Red, white and black from the 616. This is all successfully blended into the Ultimate universe.
Welcome, Ironlurker!
I agree, it was a nice blending of RW&B and the Infinity formula. It was subtle, and effective.
The super soldier serum will have faded from his system like Mark Millar implied is happening to Cap in the first Ultimates volume. Fury will be a failed super soldier like Liberman. I have no problem with this at all.
Millar never implied the serum was weakening from his system - except one off-hand comment by Kleiser. Then Millar went on Millarworld and mentioned how he'd subtely been setting up that Cap was indeed weakening and that it would pay off in Grand Theft America.
Then, he decided that GTA really really needed a TLC match and forgot to put any of that in.
And as for Stark in the Ultimate U....Warren Ellis redeemed that whole Ultimate Iron man series with one line in Ultimate Human.
Not nanomonkey.
It is Computronium!
'tis an awesome word.
Anyhow, my thoughts on Fury as a super soldier: does not make sense with his character as established to date. Fury repeatedly goes on about how Rogers is the only guy the serum works on, but that's not true. Fury is desperately trying to crack the serum, whereas here he hates it and thinks it's a bad thing. Now, he could be lying and playing up the idea that he's a normal man, however, I don't feel the character has been written with that in mind. It just doesn't gel. This is very subjective, but... in Earth X, the revelations about characters that Krueger and Ross came up with felt like it had ALWAYS been planned. They were inspired (for the most part). But this just feels like something someone just made up now or something that they had intended and forgot about. In fact, this whole mini series feels like it was meant to be written five years ago, everyone forgot about it, and now that Ultimatum is ****ing everything up, Bendis wants to do it now before it's too late.
As it is, so far the big revelation is that every superpower ever (ok, so I'm exaggerating a little) is related to the super soldier serum. Something we've known for a LONG time. There's not been any new players. And the idea that mutants are related to the super soldier serum is not particularly new.
But back to Fury - the main problem I have is that this is a bit like the Widow-traitor reveal, instead of adding to the character, it subtracts. Sure, it adds to the character in a technical sense - he now has more baggage and established continuity. But it makes him less unique. He's essentially Black Captain America Wolverine. Before, Nick Fury was a guy who was so desperate to win the next big war that in his preparations to face it and survive, he was continually creating CATALYSTS that would jumpstart this war.
Think about that - the guy is going out trying to save the world from a genetic war, yet every step he takes to saving the world brings the deadline closer and escalates the stakes. Before he came around, there were just a few superhumans. Now the Ultimates is dozens upon dozens strong and there's also the Union.
What made this more interesting is that he was a normal guy. He was James Bond - an extremely capable man (who needed to use a lot of gadgets according to Millar's X-Men run) and an extremely knowledgeable one, but his was the struggle of the ordinary man on the front line of the genetic war that would lead to an evolutionary cataclysm.
If he's not an ordinary man, but one of the first of these supermen, then the impression is not that he's trying to prevent or survive the cataclysm, he's not desperate and unsure of the outcome, but rather, he's part of the climax, he's the end result. It's hard to explain this vibe, so maybe I'm not making much sense.
But then, it doesn't make sense he'd keep his nature a secret all this time. Ross makes it abundantly clear he TRIED to be found. And when you consider that he's debriefing people he trusts with information on the Chitauri and trying to get another super soldier working and that the Hulk was created in a botched attempt... it makes no sense that Fury wouldn't be open about his superhuman nature to the Ultimates. But then, Bendis was also the guy who wrote Fury as a guy who, when seeing a 16-year old kid called Parker get spider-powers, realised he might become a major supervillain so decided to threaten him with a government draft, built an army of robotic spider-slayers to fight him, then got his archnemesis to make a clone army of him, instead of, you know, telling him he's got superpowers and bonding with the kid.
Fury not making sense - been there.
But... I just feel something's been lost. Fury was a lot more interesting as an underdog, this ordinary guy in the center of a genetic storm. Making him a superhuman just takes away that edge.
It just... I dunno. I think it just makes him more dull. Every superhero bar Spidey is now tied to the super soldier serum in WW2, and they were all friends there. It's funny in the Venture Brothers how Monarch, Brock, Rusty, and Unterbeit and everyone else was at the same college. But here, it just seems lazy, tacked on, arbitrary, and farcical. It's just the same note being repeated over and over. Wolverine, Captain America, Magneto - they're all now WW2 super soldiers and so is Fury. It's like Bendis just had one good idea Grant Morrison already had two years before him and just keeps repeating it again and again.
Plus... and here's the thing: Fury was MYSTERIOUS. He was an enigma. Like Thor, it was actually entertaining we didn't know everything about him. That mystery helped keep him arbitrary. Remember how Thor was able to straddle the line of being a god AND a crazy man? The ambiguity let us dip on either side depending on the scene. Fury had that arbitrary nature - was he the saviour of mankind... or the architect of its destruction? Was he doing good or bad? And part of that came out from his origins being unknown. We just assumed he was a black ops agent who got promoted because he was BADASS. He was so BADASS that he outranks superhumans and knows everything. Turns out he's not mysterious. He's just Captain America II: The Wolverining. Turns out he's not BADASS. He's a guy who ran away and didn't do anything for 60 years and got promoted because he's been alive for a long time and has a unique body chemistry (that isn't ever brought up again).
So... I just think he's stopped being a badass. He's stopped being mysterious. He's stopped being ambiguous. And what did he gain? The super power of living for ages.
I don't think that's a good trade.
