THE AVENGERS #19-22: ULTRON UNLIMITED.
Is the acclaimed Busiek-Perez series really little more than a bad soap?

Writer: Kurt Busiek
Artists: George Perez, Al Vey
Colorist: Tom Smith
Letterer: Richard Starkings and Comicraft's Wes Abbott
4-issue story arc
Published by Marvel Comics 1999
$1.99 each

Reviewed by Pindaros

The Busiek-Perez run on THE AVENGERS is for many readers a standard for quality writing and art in the superhero books. The book has the hallmarks of "great storytelling" which is the supposed virtue of the otherwise dismissible superhero genre: vivid characters, gripping plots and realistic, yet emotionally expressive drawing.

It is also a perfect example of why I got sick of superheroes when I was 11.

Just so you don't think I'm totally clueless, I can recognize the virtues of Busiek's and Perez's work. Busiek knows Marvel history and the Marvel characters, and shows real genius in developing innovative and dramatic plots from the material he is given.

In the 'Ultron Unlimited' story-arc of this last summer, the Avengers battle all of the Ultrons they have ever encountered in the past, and perhaps another 1000 or so in addition, and Busiek's expertise allows him to give distinct voices to all of them. More significantly, the story is a climatic moment in relationships between Hank Pym and the Wasp, Pym and Ultron, Ultron and Vision, that have been important threads in the tapestry of Avengers history since the sixties.

Perez is a useful partner in spinning this tale, given his consistent success in evoking fantastic grandeur, horrifying destruction and realistic human emotions. His mastery of the medium is particularly apparent when one reflects on how practical his style is for dealing with the flat color that comics were printed in when he started out. It makes the most of flat color, using line-work that is intricate and expressive, but leaves a maximum of white page space for the colorist to work with. Pick up an old issue of NEW TEEN TITANS and instead of pages that look cheap, you get panels in which the flat color looks restrained and even realistic within the bounds of Perez's lines.

"Busiek comments on personalities in a way that fills them out... but also makes me less interested"

While this style was particularly apt for the '80's, Perez's work in THE AVENGERS shows that it remains a powerful way of dealing with the division of labor between penciller, inker and colorist. The practical result is to offer greater autonomy for the colorist, a freedom that colorist Smith uses to great effect. For instance, when Thor pulverizes an Ultron, the inked lines present a sense of metal being virtually liquified by the force of Thor's hammer, while the color presents a study in blue and gray so that the primary-colored Thor seems like a sun in a blue sky.

But the obvious skill of Busiek and Perez really drives home to me how insignificant quality is in drawing me into a comic. In the rest of this review I want to articulate just what it is that disappointed me about 'Ultron Unlimited,' and insofar as I'm typical in having a fairly ambivalent relationship to comics, it might help explain why superhero comics tend to appeal to a relatively small society of readers.

I want to start from that aspect of the story-telling that so many readers feel marks Marvel's "maturity": the attempt to make the superheroes in the comics as much like "real people" as possible. In 'Ultron Unlimited,' there are a number of cases where Busiek comments on the personalities of characters in a way that certainly fills them out... but also makes me less interested in them.

One instance occurs when the Avengers are set upon by a crowd of Ultrons, and a scientist present thinks to herself (instead of running away) that "Ultron's one of the Avengers' deadliest enemies, but they didn't flinch! They just rely on their power, their experience." In a similar incident, the Black Panther observes a new Avenger, Firestar, and concludes that "She has the spirit of a true Avenger."

With such comments, Busiek depicts the Avengers as an exclusive club, even a clique, that one joins by showing an ability and willingness to fight against seemingly impossible odds.

Saving the world and finding oneself a gang are placed on an equivalent level, suggesting that adolescent social life is genuinely a matter of life and death. Whether you're one of the cool kids is the kind of concern that "real people" always have, at least if you're living in the Marvel Universe.

A quite different aspect of the story that bugs me is the depiction of gender. This is not a matter of feminist fairness, but the way that the gender roles in the story are so incredibly fixed. Busiek's writing is completely locked into the male-warrior/female-nurturer dynamic that Stan Lee brought to comics as a man of the World War II generation.

Since the first issue of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, Marvel comics have generally ascribed more sophisticated emotional reactions to women. Men are capable of anger, exuberance, self-doubt or despair (basically expressions of whether their powers are going to explode or be inadequate), but worry, affection, joy, pity and sadness all belong almost exclusively to women. Aside from the contorted postures meant to display butts and boobs, women's bodies in Marvel comics have greater freedom in their postures for the expression of emotion.

'Ultron Unlimited' locates human emotion entirely within this dichotomy. The Scarlet Witch is portrayed with an almost liquid emotional life, first when she folk-dances in a restaurant (female emotion as spectacle) then later when she uses hex-power against Alkhema (female emotion as destructive power.) In both cases her emotion is portrayed as something that overwhelms her, so that she remains fearful of it, although it has positive results.

"The ultimate annoyance of 'Ultron Unlimited' is exactly what fans probably consider a virtue"

The Wasp's emotions are an even more crucial story-telling tool. From her first appearance she is in an overwrought, but highly articulate, state of hysteria. In explaining her fears for Henry Pym, she provides the essential backstory for the story, which will explain Ultron's actions and lay the groundwork for Pym's ultimate defeat of his nemesis. This is especially important for the portrayal of Pym's character, since in his more masculine state of emotional disturbance, he is largely incoherent, even catatonic, throughout much of the story.

In contrast, most of the male Avengers are just action figures. Captain America always deserves criticism in this respect, as an unimaginative depiction of how male America feels about its manhood (in both the literal and metaphorical sense of that word). The genius of the Kirby-Simon original was that here was a guy who liked beating the shit out of bad guys because they were his country's enemies. I understand that things are more complicated than they were in '39, but that should be a challenge for a writer, not an excuse for why a character is boring.

The ultimate annoyance of 'Ultron Unlimited' is exactly what many fans probably consider a virtue: that these idiosyncratic ideas about cliques and gender are depicted in a style that calls attention to itself as "realistic." I like when Kirby and Ditko draw these kind of stories, or when stylists like Liefeld and Bachalo do them; by drawing in an overtly fantastic way, those artists create space for the reader to reflect on the values presented, and enjoy their presentation whether they share them or not. But with an artist like John Buscema, John Byrne -- or George Perez -- you start to get the sense that you're watching TV, at which point the extreme emotions, the costumes and the threats of world domination just seem excessive and silly.

All the effort that Perez puts into detail and realism in THE AVENGERS makes it feel like a soap opera, except that with a soap opera writers draw drama out of fairly realistic situations. But thousands of robots coming down from the sky, wiping out a small country, and having the power to wipe out the world is a genuinely bizarre situation that no amount of realistic art or characterization can make plausible.

The best superhero books explore those aspects of human character that reflect encounters with bizarre, overwhelming situations. To pretend that concerns about belonging and notions of women as the bearers of all emotion are the essence of humanity that is revealed in genuine disaster is a recipe for boring art.

Soap operas leavened with genocide to make them seem more important just won't cut it.

Recommended (with reservations: this is classic Marvel, for better or worse)

Pindaros is a regular contributor to PopImage.

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