Was Millar's X-Men Too Over the Top?

Every single first run of each Ultimate title takes place in a different universe.

In UXM and Ultimates, the government has absurd amount of power. They can have you shot and they can have you killed. If people are okay with brutally slaughtering dozens of innocent mutants, then in a world with supervillains and super spies, how long do you think it'll be before a high- or mid-level employee who starts leaking things to the press or getting a bit too chatty "suddenly has the X-gene"? And in one issue of the Ultimates, Hawkeye and the Black Widow kill an entire office building full of people. An entire office building! In the middle of New York! And it blows up! Whiskey tango foxtrot!

And that's just talking about the political ramifications. The amount of technology is insane. Invisibility! Sixty foot tall enforcer robots, when our human-size robots can barely run, much less improvise and fight superheroes! How can they take one step without causing massive, expensive property damage? Aren't they so big that no matter where they put their feet, they're trespassing? Lasers! Devices that can automatically scan your DNA! A satellite that can find anyone in the world within seconds! Levitation!

And then we get to USM. Where the ENTIRE WORLD is EXACTLY THE SAME. None of this has had the least bit of impact, except for a few cultural easter eggs. And the kids aren't foaming at the mouth, witch-hunt, rip suspects to shreds mutant-phobic, which is what they'd have to be if there are Sentinels just sitting there watching them, ready to swoop down and kill random bystanders at any moment.

Oh, and then there's UFF, home of time travel, teleportation, a robot that can do anything, artificial intelligence, and just generally weird and wacky ****.

Every new arc/miniseries that takes place in the Ultimate universe rips it a little bit more to shreds. I remember reading on Dave's Long Box, a blog, that vibranium, adamantium, cosmic rays or Stilt-Man alone would cause a paradigm shift in our society the likes of which had never been seen. We couldn't imagine what a world with superheroes would be like, which is why comics have to ignore the social changes which would logically come about. But is it too much to ask that the Ultimate universe have even the barest shred of internal consistency and logic to it?

Also, the spell-checker doesn't accept "teleportation" as a correctly spelled word. What's up with that?
 
E said:
No need to apologize. I agree.

I could NOT get into UXM before Bendis took over. And his run wasn't even very good.

I didn't like how the Sentinels were used at all, and the book just seemed to try and cram 35 years of X-Men stories into a few dozen issues. It was all over the place and hard to read.
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Same here.

I felt like it was just a new 616 X-Men story --- overwritten and overpacked with Claremontisms --- set in a new continuity.
 
TwilightEL said:
Every single first run of each Ultimate title takes place in a different universe.

In UXM and Ultimates, the government has absurd amount of power. They can have you shot and they can have you killed. If people are okay with brutally slaughtering dozens of innocent mutants, then in a world with supervillains and super spies, how long do you think it'll be before a high- or mid-level employee who starts leaking things to the press or getting a bit too chatty "suddenly has the X-gene"? And in one issue of the Ultimates, Hawkeye and the Black Widow kill an entire office building full of people. An entire office building! In the middle of New York! And it blows up! Whiskey tango foxtrot!

And that's just talking about the political ramifications. The amount of technology is insane. Invisibility! Sixty foot tall enforcer robots, when our human-size robots can barely run, much less improvise and fight superheroes! How can they take one step without causing massive, expensive property damage? Aren't they so big that no matter where they put their feet, they're trespassing? Lasers! Devices that can automatically scan your DNA! A satellite that can find anyone in the world within seconds! Levitation!

And then we get to USM. Where the ENTIRE WORLD is EXACTLY THE SAME. None of this has had the least bit of impact, except for a few cultural easter eggs. And the kids aren't foaming at the mouth, witch-hunt, rip suspects to shreds mutant-phobic, which is what they'd have to be if there are Sentinels just sitting there watching them, ready to swoop down and kill random bystanders at any moment.

Oh, and then there's UFF, home of time travel, teleportation, a robot that can do anything, artificial intelligence, and just generally weird and wacky ****.

Every new arc/miniseries that takes place in the Ultimate universe rips it a little bit more to shreds. I remember reading on Dave's Long Box, a blog, that vibranium, adamantium, cosmic rays or Stilt-Man alone would cause a paradigm shift in our society the likes of which had never been seen. We couldn't imagine what a world with superheroes would be like, which is why comics have to ignore the social changes which would logically come about. But is it too much to ask that the Ultimate universe have even the barest shred of internal consistency and logic to it?

Also, the spell-checker doesn't accept "teleportation" as a correctly spelled word. What's up with that?
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We have a spell-checker?
 
ourchair said:
I think more people would agree with you than you'd expect. Including me.

You'd think Millar would have at least tried to read the Morrison Manifesto.
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Really? Everywhere I go it seems people are praising his run on UXM. I thought I was the only one that really didn't like it.

E said:
No need to apologize. I agree.

I could NOT get into UXM before Bendis took over. And his run wasn't even very good.

I didn't like how the Sentinels were used at all, and the book just seemed to try and cram 35 years of X-Men stories into a few dozen issues. It was all over the place and hard to read.
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ourchair said:
Same here.

I felt like it was just a new 616 X-Men story --- overwritten and overpacked with Claremontisms --- set in a new continuity.
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I agree with all you guys said. I think Miller rushed a lot of storylines that needed much more time to be explained. For example, I think Wolverine should have been introduced in his own storyline later down the line, rather then having him, the X-Men, Sentinels and the Brotherhood all in the very first arc.
 
TwilightEL said:
Every single first run of each Ultimate title takes place in a different universe.

In UXM and Ultimates, the government has absurd amount of power. They can have you shot and they can have you killed. If people are okay with brutally slaughtering dozens of innocent mutants, then in a world with supervillains and super spies, how long do you think it'll be before a high- or mid-level employee who starts leaking things to the press or getting a bit too chatty "suddenly has the X-gene"? And in one issue of the Ultimates, Hawkeye and the Black Widow kill an entire office building full of people. An entire office building! In the middle of New York! And it blows up! Whiskey tango foxtrot!
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Now see that doesn't make sense in my opinion. In the real world if the government blew buses and office builds in dowtown NYC, they would be voted out of office at the next election or the President would be impeached by Congress. People are confusing cynicism with realism, they are not interchangible. After 9-11 we didn't see Muslim Americans getting killed on national TV, with no trial, because people in Western countries have changed over the past 100 years. The government blowing up buses is completely randomized violence and if there is one thing people can't stand, its randomized violence. If a the government secretly tried to have Drake killed, that would be would realistic, but blowing up a bus with people in it, to do it, totally unrealistic. How can the government promise security if it blows up buses at random? Such a government, especially that is supposed to be in democratic nation, would not survive. The best way for a government to survive is through more subtle means of control, a point I think is lost in UXM.

The problem with Ultimate X-men and 616 X-Men is that it seems like the normal humans all have a genocidal hatred towards mutants and there is very rarely any counter blalance. Seriously even in Nazi Germany, some Germans did not hate Jews and even tried help them and I would hope Ultimate America is more enlightened than Nazi Germany. I think if UXM wanted to different from 616 X-Men, the hatred against mutants should have been more subtle, more insidious, less out in the open, expressing itself in something more realistic than genocidal rage, like the way racism exists in our society.
 
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The Overlord said:
The problem with Ultimate X-men and 616 X-Men is that it seems like the normal humans all have a genocidal hatred towards mutants and there is very rarely any counter blalance. Seriously even in Nazi Germany, some Germans did not hate Jews and even tried help them and I would hope Ultimate America is more enlightened than Nazi Germany. I think if UXM wanted to different from 616 X-Men, the hatred against mutants should have been more subtle, more insidious, less out in the open, expressing itself in something more realistic than genocidal rage, like the way racism exists in our society.
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Right, like lynchings and stuff! I think it's far more scary to have the government ignore you and the general populace hate you than it is to have the government hate you and the people tolerate you, like in God Loves, Man Kills. I love that book more than human companionship.
 
I still think The Tomorrow People is one of the best Ultimate stories. I love how it was break-neck pacing, huge in scope, and threw ****loads in their. It felt Ultimate. I wish the X-Men films had been as good.

Weapon X wasn't too bad, it was quite good. I really enjoyed World Tour, but didn't enjoy Fire and Brimstone too much. I felt it was too trivial. And Return of the King started great but had an incomprehensible top trumps ending.

But Tomorrow People - it rocks.
 
TwilightEL said:
Right, like lynchings and stuff! I think it's far more scary to have the government ignore you and the general populace hate you than it is to have the government hate you and the people tolerate you, like in God Loves, Man Kills. I love that book more than human companionship.
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Right, lynchings, that was almost 100 years, after WWII and the Civil Rights movement, people in the US wouldn't tolerate public executions of people, simply because they are minorities. Things have changed in the last 100 years and it isn't realistic not to take that into account.
 
The Overlord said:
Right, lynchings, that was almost 100 years, after WWII and the Civil Rights movement, people in the US wouldn't tolerate public executions of people, simply because they are minorities. Things have changed in the last 100 years and it isn't realistic not to take that into account.
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Yeah, but any less realistic than giant robots of doom flying around? I can see the government keeping a close eye on mutants, minor hysteria among the people, including racism and discrimination, and maybe some psycho religious groups. But let's assume that the government was secretly hiding the technology to build giant robots...would they really just indescriminately kill mutants on the street? Lynchings aren't totally realistic...but we were doing it to people with a different skin color a couple decades ago, so how do you think the American public would react to people with laserbeams shooting out of their eyes?
 
I have to go with Wade here. Just because it's not happening now, doesn't mean it never happened. It's a fictional story and it's got metaphors in it. This is one of them. I think having mutants so despised as to be executed publicly is a powerful, effective, and succinct way to depict this fictional world.

If you were right. You're sadly, wrong. Public executions of minorities happen all the time. Sure, there are parts of the world in which this doesn't happen, and thankfully, those of us on this site live in those worlds. But in a lot of parts of our planet, far too many I think, people are killed over this kind of thing, and seldom need much justification. :(
 
The Overlord said:
Right, lynchings, that was almost 100 years, after WWII and the Civil Rights movement, people in the US wouldn't tolerate public executions of people, simply because they are minorities. Things have changed in the last 100 years and it isn't realistic not to take that into account.
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When I said lynchings, I didn't mean literally mobs of random citizens or even law enforcement officials kidnapping people and hanging them from a tree. I meant random mobs attacks.

Also... a hundred years ago? Try forty. In 1964, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers (two white, one black) were murdered by members of the Klu Klux Klan on a back road after being chased by their cars. Their murderers included a deputy sheriff, who had recognized one of them as being an a "Klan death list" (this is all from a book, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, by Steven M. Gillon). When police dredged the swamp where their bodies were dumped, they found other corpses of black folks who had apparently been killed by the Klan, including a four-year-old.

The campaign for civil rights that those men were part of (their names were Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner) had a curfew for its members because they were in so much danger. Their members wouldn't travel on the same road twice. Churches were being firebombed.

The group had brought in white college students because they couldn't get enough attention for how black folks were being treated. The white mens' deaths finally caught the media's attention, when churches were being firebombed. It's not a public attention, but people down there knew what was going on, and they tolerated the Klan as members of their police force.
 
Wade_Wilson said:
Yeah, but any less realistic than giant robots of doom flying around? I can see the government keeping a close eye on mutants, minor hysteria among the people, including racism and discrimination, and maybe some psycho religious groups. But let's assume that the government was secretly hiding the technology to build giant robots...would they really just indescriminately kill mutants on the street? Lynchings aren't totally realistic...but we were doing it to people with a different skin color a couple decades ago, so how do you think the American public would react to people with laserbeams shooting out of their eyes?
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Well then that's another problem, I don't find the giant Sentinels realistic either. They are too large, clunky and expensive and they cause far too much damage crowded civilian areas, not a good weapon to use on America's shores. Having giant Sentinles blowing up buses because one mutant his inside is wasteful and will make the government unpopular and ensure they will be defeated in the next election. Ultimate america is still a democracy, the government can't act like a dictatorship and do whatever it wants on America's shores, without a political price to be paid. Something more realistic would be Sentinel sleeper agents, robots disguised as humans who kidnap mutants off the street with no one noticing, that's far more realistic and creepy.

Again the UU is for the most part more realistic than 616 MU in a social context, rather than a scientific one. If the UU was realistic, then why haven't we seen that level of genocidal hatred aimed Muslim Americans in the wake of 9-11? Lynchings would have realistic before WWII and the Civil Rights Movement, but after those events, completely unrealistic. i can see the public disliking and not trusting mutants, but supporting giant robots executing mutants on live TV, with no trial and letting them kill whoever else happens to be in their way, no that is completely unrealistic.

TwilightEL said:
When I said lynchings, I didn't mean literally mobs of random citizens or even law enforcement officials kidnapping people and hanging them from a tree. I meant random mobs attacks.

Also... a hundred years ago? Try forty. In 1964, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers (two white, one black) were murdered by members of the Klu Klux Klan on a back road after being chased by their cars. Their murderers included a deputy sheriff, who had recognized one of them as being an a "Klan death list" (this is all from a book, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, by Steven M. Gillon). When police dredged the swamp where their bodies were dumped, they found other corpses of black folks who had apparently been killed by the Klan, including a four-year-old.


The campaign for civil rights that those men were part of (their names were Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner) had a curfew for its members because they were in so much danger. Their members wouldn't travel on the same road twice. Churches were being firebombed.

The group had brought in white college students because they couldn't get enough attention for how black folks were being treated. The white mens' deaths finally caught the media's attention, when churches were being firebombed. It's not a public attention, but people down there knew what was going on, and they tolerated the Klan as members of their police force.
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That happened before the Civil Rights concluded, can you name an example that occured after the Civil Rights movement as finished?

Besides that was done by the Klan, not by the government on national TV for everyone to see. If the FOH attacked and killed some mutants, that I could except as somewhat realistic. But the government killing mutants on national TV, using giant robots that kill a whole bunch of regular people in the process and the people blindly supporting it? Completely unrealistic.
 
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The Overlord said:
Well then that's another problem, I don't find the giant Sentinels realistic either. They are too large, clunky and expensive and they cause far too much damage crowded civilian areas, not a good weapon to use on America's shores. Having giant Sentinles blowing up buses because one mutant his inside is wasteful and will make the government unpopular and ensure they will be defeated in the next election. Ultimate america is still a democracy, the government can't act like a dictatorship and do whatever it wants on America's shores, without a political price to be paid. Something more realistic would be Sentinel sleeper agents, robots disguised as humans who kidnap mutants off the street with no one noticing, that's far more realistic and creepy.

Again the UU is for the most part more realistic than 616 MU in a social context, rather than a scientific one. If the UU was realistic, then why haven't we seen that level of genocidal hatred aimed Muslim Americans in the wake of 9-11? Lynchings would have realistic before WWII and the Civil Rights Movement, but after those events, completely unrealistic. i can see the public disliking and not trusting mutants, but supporting giant robots executing mutants on live TV, with no trial and letting them kill whoever else happens to be in their way, no that is completely unrealistic.
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I agree with you. That's why I think it makes more sense for mutants to be "supported" by the government and for them to be attacked in private. A big Sentinel attack in public in broad daylight isn't as realistic as a car driven off the road in the middle of the night.
 
The Overlord said:
Well then that's another problem, I don't find the giant Sentinels realistic either. They are too large, clunky and expensive and they cause far too much damage crowded civilian areas, not a good weapon to use on America's shores. Having giant Sentinles blowing up buses because one mutant his inside is wasteful and will make the government unpopular and ensure they will be defeated in the next election. Ultimate america is still a democracy, the government can't act like a dictatorship and do whatever it wants on America's shores, without a political price to be paid. Something more realistic would be Sentinel sleeper agents, robots disguised as humans who kidnap mutants off the street with no one noticing, that's far more realistic and creepy.

Again the UU is for the most part more realistic than 616 MU in a social context, rather than a scientific one. If the UU was realistic, then why haven't we seen that level of genocidal hatred aimed Muslim Americans in the wake of 9-11? Lynchings would have realistic before WWII and the Civil Rights Movement, but after those events, completely unrealistic. i can see the public disliking and not trusting mutants, but supporting giant robots executing mutants on live TV, with no trial and letting them kill whoever else happens to be in their way, no that is completely unrealistic.
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Well, let me ask you this...did blacks ever crash planes into buildings? Not as far as I know. And yet...well, I'm not going to go over the details, as TwilightEl just did. Attacking a group of people thanks to something they did stops being racism and starts just being hate crimes/genocide. People hate mutants because they're mutants...not because of anything they've ever done. Some people hate Muslims because they think that they're terrorists. There's a difference.
 
The Overlord said:
Well then that's another problem, I don't find the giant Sentinels realistic either. They are too large, clunky and expensive and they cause far too much damage crowded civilian areas, not a good weapon to use on America's shores. Having giant Sentinles blowing up buses because one mutant his inside is wasteful and will make the government unpopular and ensure they will be defeated in the next election. Ultimate america is still a democracy, the government can't act like a dictatorship and do whatever it wants on America's shores, without a political price to be paid. Something more realistic would be Sentinel sleeper agents, robots disguised as humans who kidnap mutants off the street with no one noticing, that's far more realistic and creepy.
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That's an extremely lucid point. Sentinels are cool, but damn if you don't have a point here.

Though, you do realise your new Setinels are Terminators. :p
 
Wade_Wilson said:
Well, let me ask you this...did blacks ever crash planes into buildings? Not as far as I know. And yet...well, I'm not going to go over the details, as TwilightEl just did. Attacking a group of people thanks to something they did stops being racism and starts just being hate crimes/genocide. People hate mutants because they're mutants...not because of anything they've ever done. Some people hate Muslims because they think that they're terrorists. There's a difference.
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The problem with the comparsion is you seem to think American society hasn't progressed at all since the 1920s. Personally I think it be very hard for the type racism to exist in today's society. Racism today is more subtle, less overt then the past. With the relevation the Holocaust and the sucess of the Civil Rights movement has made that type of racism very unpopular in the Western world. If the government executed anyone without a trial on national TV, they would have groups like the ACLU after them, there would be senate hearings, and bunch of other things that wouldn't have done in
30s. The fact that mutants were killed isn't unrealistic, the fact that the government was killing is not unrealistic, the fact they were doing it on national TV, using methods that lead to deaths of a lot of normal humans in the process and people just ate it up, is unrealistic.





TwilightEL said:
I agree with you. That's why I think it makes more sense for mutants to be "supported" by the government and for them to be attacked in private. A big Sentinel attack in public in broad daylight isn't as realistic as a car driven off the road in the middle of the night.
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See that is why i thought Millar was overtop in regards to the hatred against Mutants, FOH memebers attacking and killing mutants and the police looking the other way, I can buy, but people supporting executions on national TV, with no trial, is too much.

Bass said:
That's an extremely lucid point. Sentinels are cool, but damn if you don't have a point here.

Though, you do realise your new Setinels are Terminators. :p
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Yeah, but so what, the Brood are just ripoffs of Aliens and Marvel never seemed to mind that. Actually I believe such Sentinels were used during the Operation Zero tolerance in the 616 universe.

Frankly I wonder how these giant Sentinels were pitched...

General: Okay is to deal with the mutant issue, we have built giant 60 foot robots to hunt them down.

President: Why did you make them 60 feet tall? That makes them way more expensive to make and way more likely to cause collateral damage! What were you thinking?!

General: Uhhh.... We thought it be cool if they were 60 feet tall.

President:..... You're an idiot.
 
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