You know what I'm talking about – that part of your brain that makes you think Gambit is the coolest character ever despite your better judgment in similar situations it's the part of my brain that wants me to stand up and thrust my fist into the air while yelling, " Marvel Ultimate Alliance? Ten out of ten!" It's that childish part of my brain that, as a 10-year-old, couldn't stomach the way Captain America talked, but loved the way he could knock out 30 Hydra foot soldiers with a single toss of his shield – the same feeling that kept me reading throughout the notoriously misguided Clone Saga just because I could see Spidey climb up walls and flip-kick bad guys, even if I hated the way the all-new female version of Doctor Octopus looked and acted (and this very sacrifice causing me to drop away from all mainstream comics after being exhausted by the wasteful resolution of this storyline). I tell myself that I'm back into mainstream comics because the writing and art is good enough to erase the pitiful missteps of the '90s, but really, a good half of that excitement is because I love these characters simply because they are. This is a good time to be reading mainstream comics, and things are poised to get even better.Īnd here is my trouble with Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I'm even reading Moon Knight every month – a character I've never had any connection to, and never read any of the previous volumes worth of stories about – and I'm stuck to it. Captain America, traditionally one of the more two-dimensional characters in the Marvel arsenal, has, thanks to the handling of writers Ed Brubaker and Mark Millar, become probably the most complex and captivating of the bunch. I have an immense amount of respect for these characters in fact, the only "pocket" of Marvel's work that I've never really clicked with is the ever-popular X-Men world, which I've always found to be far too convoluted for my tastes – and I'm reading Astonishing X-Men in paperback form, because it's so well made. That's basically saying that superhero comics have become the best of the derivative media, but hey, almost all media is derivative, so that's saying a lot! It has something to do with my childhood obsession with Spider-Man comics, along with rediscovering that, after the hell that was the '90s, comic books with superheroes suddenly became not just good, but one of the best, most complex genre-storytelling mediums. While I've hated my fair share of Marvel books throughout the years – hundreds, probably – I have this strange affinity for anything related to the Marvel Universe and even its spin-offs (Ultimate Marvel, Squadron Supreme, that possible future universe where Spider-Girl is set, etc., etc., etc.). Jim Jarmusch, Kurt Vonnegut, Hideo Kojima, and Brian Bendis cause me to blindly buy into whatever they do, and I probably shouldn't be allowed to review anything they work on, at least by any sensible editor. Sure, I love all media in a strangely obsessive way – film, books, videogames, and yeah, comics, too – but there are a few creators and ideas that seem to click with me perfectly. This review is going to require a massive amount of restraint for me.
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