Broken Frontier

Six months ago, Bruce Banner told Spider-Man that the big secret was it was all connected.  Flashback to 66 years ago and we witness the first misstep in the Super Soldier Program, then we get to see America and Canada scramble to create the most effective metabeing for war.

I like Bendis.  I really do.  I am a big fan of his work on The Avengers books.  I liked the idea of House of M and have enjoyed Secret Invasion thus far.  This however left a big question mark stapled to my forehead.  Some of that might be that outside of The Ultimates & Ultimate Iron Man , I have read very little of the Ultimate Universe.  I’ve given all of it numerous shots, but usually lose interest after a few issues.  I don’t know why, but I just don’t get the universe.

So there is that confusion, but I came into the middle of Ellis’ Ultimate Galactus trilogy with no problems at all.  This book jumps through time so much that it was tedious to read.  The biggest problem is that it relies on your Marvel Handbook knowledge a little too much.  Someone help me here, was the Fisk in the book a very young and slender Kingpin?

There are great ideas here.  The first Super Soldier truly being a symbol only strikes of American policy.  Put a guy in a suit, that’ll scare the bad guys!  Heck, the entire existence of Super Humans being created through the government is a pretty nifty idea and will hopefully pay big dividends in the end, but this felt like muddled set up to me.  The action is incomprehensible at a couple of points.

Some of this lies on Guice’s shoulders as there are very murky panels here.  I will say that it is not solely his fault though.  He is a capable artist, never one of my favorites, but he won’t deter me from buying a book.  Here Ponsor’s dark coloring and what I have come to realize is Bendis’ weird scripting (there are two whole pages of this comic that have no meaning to me other than Fury’s capture) are as much to blame.  It is a failure of the team to capture the story, not of one artist or writer.

There is enough here to get me to read the second issue, but if this is the big launch to Ultimatum, I kind of wonder if I will be there for the end of the Ultimate Universe.