The Ultimates 2, Vol. 2: Grand Theft America
Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch
Marvel, 2007
Rating: 4.0

The Boys, Vol. 1: Name of the Game
Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson
Dynamite, 2007
Rating: 3.5

Since superhero stories are at heart power fantasies, themes of unchecked power and corruption come pretty easily – especially in this day and age, in which America’s involvement in Iraq is painted as either selfless heroism or megalomania, depending on which divisive political commentator’s beliefs you subscribe to. That theme reared its potentially unwieldy head in a big way in the previous installment of The Ultimates, and it rests at the very core of The Boys, Garth Ennis’ and Darick Robertson’s gleefully aggressive tale of a covert group tasked with reining in the excesses of the super-powered set.

But in the end, both the first collection of The Boys and the final collection of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Ultimates run suggest that for both titles, questions of absolute power and responsibility are just so much window-dressing, serving as either justification or garnish for tableaus of violent action calculated to warm the heart of any red-blooded adolescent male. 

Grand Theft America wraps up the Millar-Hitch Ultimates era with all the full-scale property damage, bloody combat and big-equals-badass machismo of its predecessors. Millar gleefully feeds Hitch eye-popping scenarios to illustrate, from flying aircraft carriers colliding in midair and giant robots stomping all over New York to the massacre of Hawkeye’s family and an invading army storming America’s shores in the name of thwarting its imperial aggression. Part of Air Force One gets blown off, Iron Man flies into action piloting a humongous monstrosity armed with cannons the size of football stadiums, and the hordes of Asgard – giant wolves, snakes, trolls, etc. – are unleashed, to boot. There’s even a giant, multi-page foldout spread cramming tons of characters into one vibrant poster-worthy snapshot of action-movie overload.

Millar and Hitch deliver an explosive ending to a steroid-pumped saga, the wet dream of any fanboy who craves smashmouth superhero action. One character – an Iraqi analog to Captain America – mouths some platitudes early on about the world being a safer place with this “new Roman Empire” restrained. But really, it’s all about the mayhem, the pleasures of watching alpha males in brightly colored costumes kick the shit out of each other and reduce whole cities to rubble in the process. Not for nothing is one of the chapters in this trade titled “Indepence Day,” after the 1996 alien-invasion movie that so perfectly personifies this kind of slam-bang popcorn entertainment.

The Name of the Game, which collects the first arc of The Boys, has a slightly different aim: Ennis, a longtime critic of the long-underwear genre, revels in jabbing the superhero story in the eye. In this cynical world, the costumed adventurers who run the world are drug-addled, misogynist, sex-crazed egos run amuck: In one typical scene, Homelander, the vaguely Aryan head of the world’s premier superteam, the Seven, inducts the group’s newest member, a squeaky-clean do-gooder named Starlight, by instructing her to perform oral sex. And Teenage Kix, a group of adolescent heroes, isn’t much better.

Theoretically, the Boys, whose job it is to put these rampant deities in their place, are the good guys – certainly Wee Hughie, the team’s newest recruit, is a soft-spoken average guy talked into joining up when a super-speedster rashly causes the death of his brand-new girlfriend and doesn’t even stick around to apologize. But Butcher, the leader of this covert assemblage, is as violent and misogynistic as the capes he’s sworn to take down, if his grudge-sex sessions with the female head of the CIA are any indication.

Ennis wisely has Wee Hughie recoil from Butcher’s excesses, perhaps setting up a Training Day-style scenario in which the pupil decides that the teacher is as corrupt as the bad guys they’re supposed to collar. But any “power corrupts” message Ennis may be straining to insert into the proceedings is really just there to help make the graphic fight scenes go down a little smoother.

Make no mistake: The Boys exists solely for the brutal depictions of superheroes’ faces getting smashed in, the sprays of blood and flying teeth, and the shock of seeing familiar archetypes engage in raunchy sex acts. This kind of Marshal Law-style graphic violence certainly has its appeal, both for fans of Ennis’ penchant for slaughtering sacred cows and for those who like watching video game characters rip each others’ spines out. It’s done well, and Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan) helps sell it in his consistently capable fashion. But it remains to be seen whether even Robertson and Ennis can carry this grisly subgenre (call it superhero torture-porn) beyond its one-trick pony premise. 

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Comic Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.