Ultimate Avengers v.3 #2

By Colin Andersen
September 12, 2010 - 21:05

I have never been a huge fan of Steve Dillon’s artwork, but it wasn’t until now that his work has actually really detracted from a comic book that he is illustrating. The current volume of Ultimate Avengers is already frustratingly generic and having visually unappealing art certainly does not help its case. It certainly does not help that this issue came out the very same day as X-men #3. Both books have uncomfortably familiar plots: someone has managed to unite the various vampire tribes and are enacting a plan to turn superheroes into members of their vampire armies. It’s bad enough hat Marvel feels so compelled to follow the current vampire trend, but they can’t even be creative about it within their own books.

I could forgive all of that if the individual issue were any fun and, unfortunately, I didn’t find that to be the case here. Most of the issue revolves around Nerd Hulk’s attempts to make his way out into public and things, expectedly, quickly go wrong for him. The leads to the Avengers, plus Captain America having to get involved. This issue would have been a lot better if the big twist hadn’t been spoiled months ago by the solicitations. Because it was, however, I fully expected it and the only thing that interested me at all after that was the reveal of who Vampire Iron Man (for lack of a better name) is. Unfortunately for me, that reveal is only teased and never actually happens, making the whole issue even more frustrating.

   The only real positive of this issue continues to be that Mark Millar continues to confidently write all of the characters and gets their voices pretty well. However, even this isn’t as much of a compliment as it could be since so many of these characters are such recent creations that they don’t have much individual character to begin with. I don’t much care for Ultimate Blade at this point as there is little to distinguish him from his mainstream self and Nerd Hulk just came off as bratty. I can’t help but feel that this entire volume is just Mark Millar phoning it in while he works on other projects. His previous volumes were definitely not the deepest works, but they were fun and had some creative ideas. This volume is just showing itself to be derivative in nearly every way and it is a big disappointment.

   In case the first paragraph didn’t tip you off, I hate Steve Dillon’s artwork. His work looks terribly flat and static and there isn’t any distinctness to his characters. Everyone has the same ugly and there seems to be no sense of motion. There’s one scene where Nerd Hulk runs and jumps a huge distance and it felt like a series of still, boring pictures instead of conveying any real sense of movement. It makes a the whole issue even more boring than it would have been and it made the “shocking” scenes less interesting and not even fun to look at. No one suffers from this more than Vampire Iron Man. Dillon completely drop the ball on drawing an Iron Man suit and it actually makes him look significantly less intimidating.

   I don’t say this often, but I honesty have very little good to say about this issue. I actually intended to be a little more positive when I started writing this review, but I realized that I didn’t have much positive to say. I’m not one of the many detractors of Mark Millar and I genuinely enjoy many of his comic books, but I just didn’t like this issue. For whatever reason, I didn’t hate it, but I really did not like it either. I would strongly recommend to anyone, even Ultimates fans, that they wait for the trade to read these issues as they are not worth the $3.99 asking price. Now I obviously haven’t read this entire story arc and can only judge of the two issues that have been released but unless Millar has some amazing twists in store in later issues, I don’t see volume three ever being worth a full purchase.

Rating: 3 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12

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