Baron_BJ

This makes a lot of sense. Marvel (and DC) keep trying to add diversity to their rosters and this is Marvel's solution to a rather large problem that comes up when they attempt to add new minority characters in their world. That problem being that for seemingly no reason everyone with powers who initially appeared around the world (FF, Avengers, The X-Men, Spider-Man, etc) were all straight white guys and even in universe there was almost no one with powers except for straight white guys (with exceptions of course). Then all of a sudden there's an insane burst period about 10-13 years into the universe's history (in-universe, not real-time) where all these minority heroes started popping up out of nowhere.

There's no real way to explain that discrepancy, so Marvel can solve that problem by retroactively inserting the characters: "There were always minorities helping to save the world, readers just didn't know".

I'm okay with it, it's the best solution to the problem and it doesn't do any harm to the universe (unless the writing is terrible, but most introductions of this kind I've seen have been done rather well), if anything I think it just makes things more believable to have minorities running around.

OT: Yeah, they do it a lot, but I wouldn't say it happens too much.

@danhimself: Yeah, though I don't care for your idea I'd really want to see Peter's attempts at escaping this "witness protection" program. It doesn't help that there'd be motivation for Fury to keep him there; he was reinstated as head of SHIELD because of Peter's death, were he to come back his position may appear less secure. Fury has always come across as deceptive and conniving, doing anything he can do to make sure everything is safe and he'd conceivably see Peter as a threat to his ability to maintain that safety if he returned. Never came across like he'd been cold enough to outright kill Peter so this seems in character enough for Fury.

This has become a real sticking point for me as well. I understand that Miles is still meant to come across as inexperienced but can't lose because he'd F***ing die, leaving his venom sting as far too easy of an out. I don't want the ability gone, but it really needs to be nerfed hard.

I disagree with this greatly. Undoing Peter's death (which they won't do, of this I have no doubt), especially in the way that's been depicted thus-far would really be a stain on the character. He dies to save his loved ones and then just chooses to block them out and ignore them completely for over 2 years (in universe time), without even a message to inform them that he's still alive and hiding to protect them to alleviate their suffering?

As to your theory (not bad, I'll admit), but it seems strange. Peter never cowed to Nick Fury in the past, he always fought back. Short of literally imprisoning the character I have difficulty believing Peter would have just sucked it up for 2+ years.

@lynxbearaus said:

He needs to get them back. Ask about superman around anywhere and 3 things will come up, cape, the letter S and the fact he wears underwear on the outside. And yeah, change is good, but when something iconic is changed it doesn't work out well.

How I would write it (because I'm a writer who wants to get into the comics biz one day, so don't steal my idea), is that I would make it not directly briefs he is wearing, but some kind of paint on the armor. Being that the new suit is supposed to be Kryptonian battle armor, I would make it like there is different types of the armor to correspond with different military rankings.

For example

Soldier would be briefless. While commander would have the paint on.

That's actually a rather brilliant idea. Normally when I see ideas posted on these forums I want to vomit with rage over how mind-bogglingly F***ing terrible they are; for once I am pleasantly surprised.

OT: Failing that, since DC is unlikely to go with anything reminiscent of the ol' underoos, I feel that they should try and do something slightly similar to what they've done with Superman's costume in the Injustice: Gods Among Us comic series (Not the one from the game, initially he has another costume that is, in my opinion, far superior to the one used by the evil Superman in the game).

Sorry for the fact that it's side on, it's surprisingly difficult to find images of this costume that depict Superman's full frontal appearance. Just the general side-leg turned red in the general area between his lower abdominals to the bottom of his ass would rebalance the colours quite effectively AND be reminiscent of the classic Superman costume. The primary problem with this idea is how exactly to work with the belt for maximum effect, because it is a necessary divider regardless of what direction they choose to take things. I feel that this isn't as good of an idea as the person I've quoted already, but DC is going to be avoiding anything people might conceivably consider underpants at a glance.

True, his armour is basically a glorified tuxedo. However, that doesn't necessarily discount the idea entirely, it's actually very easy to rework this idea considering that the culture of Krypton in the New 52 is very much still in the air. You could simply say that the armour updates to reflect the wearer's standing within their house; Red crotch implies that the wearer is the head of the house, blue crotch implies that the wearer is not the head of the house.

This is the site that likes everything, so giving a book 2 stars makes it out to be worse than AIDS. To be fair, I've read the book and I can confirm that it really is worse than AIDS, so this is a fairly accurate assessment.

The thing that grates on me the most, outside of the boring story and terrible art, is how this entire series thus far doesn't work canonically. Characters are interacting as though they're already extremely familiar with each other and inconsistencies aren't addressed at all. I'll even ignore the fact that people behave out of character here.

• I literally own the first print of every single Ultimate Marvel Comic and I can tell you that Kitty and Jessica have NEVER F***ing met each other in any real way. Sure, Jessica may be Peter's clone and know Kitty but Kitty doesn't know that, why would she move in with a stranger? I know they met during Ultimatum, but that was for just a moment and Kitty left quickly out of confusion because a weird stranger was hugging her.
• Why the f*** is Bombshell shooting what look like beams from her hands? She causes explosions in specific locations but as of New Ultimates her powers are suddenly completely different?
• When did Cloak and Dagger find out that Miles was Spider-Man? Did it happen between books? It's one of those revelations that's big enough that it sure should have been addressed in the damn books.
• Why is Kitty living at Jessica's place? Yeah, the story has an explanation for this, but it tries to ignore the fact that she had been living with her Mother again in "Survive!". Maybe she moved out to save her mother some trouble but that's never addressed (I just double checked).
• At the start of #1 there was a cute enough little aside as to why they started the team and what they'd name themselves but that all made no sense since that was all explained in "Survive!" and it was nothing like that at all. Then again "Survive!" was a steaming pile of pig s*** that barely made any sense so I guess it's only fair people only partially acknowledge it.

Even a barely competent writer who wanted to half-*** the pieces into place for their story could have found a way to hand-wave a number of these problems away with some dialogue, like "Hey, Jessica, thanks again for letting me stay at your place for a bit, I know we only really met at the Wake but I couldn't keep letting my mom get harassed by people looking for me" (that's terrible story telling, but at least it's something AND it addressed two problems quickly).

The smart thing to do would have been to spend the first six or so issues explaining these problems, getting the team together and using all of that page space for character development whilst rarely interjecting scenes with increasing gang activity to show the gangs and their rising presence in the city. As it stands these characters interact in ways they shouldn't be capable of, we're barely introduced to the group (I know them, but a new reader would be screwed) and these powerful gangs popped up out of nowhere with a complex leadership structure already established and ready access to the SCIENCE GOO! The gangs needed to be built up to work, but NOPE, the writer got excited and wanted to skip straight to the crappy fight scenes.

This is what I'm most concerned about, up until #30 where Peter returns it looked like he was going to have amnesia, there are even solicits for a Spider-Man title being written by Fialkov that are following that premise (a TERRIBLE premise), not to mention how it kept going over the idea that he was reduced to his "defining memories". Although, in #30 of SSM the dialogue and the images of Peter's memories all portray them as having returned in their entirety (which doesn't make sense, though the portrayal of events that led to his memories returning leads me to believe this, the problem is that despite my loving SSM, the way they've dealt with memories has been completely retarded and never made sense, like they kept changing their ****ing minds!).

It seems like throughout SSM's run the team were constantly subject to some forced re-writes, especially regarding memory. It reminds me of "Ghost Peter" in the first 9 issues; there are two conflicting stories behind what happened, Slott was forced by editorial to include Ghost Peter to calm the readers and ease them into the story before shuffling him off, OR Slott received some advice from a fellow writer near launch and decided to include Ghost Peter for the same reasons (the only question is whether or not he was forced). This is why in the early issues a lot of the scenes with ghost Peter just felt like random pages jammed into an otherwise good book: They were.

Anyway, I PRAY that we're not going to get the amnesia story, that would be so trite, boring and ****ing lame.

Whilst this read better than parts of Cataclysm this was still quite terrible.

I disagree with your assessment of the art, I feel that the artist CAN do some good things, but what we get is rushed garbage (I adore cartoon styles, but this didn't feel cartoony), we're given randomly changing proportions and those proportions don't make sense (and then there's just general screw ups like how on the cover Sue Storm's boobs appear to be melting off of her chest), although there were slight signs of talent, like the scenes depicting Tony giving his speech that focused entirely on his face (god damn, go back and look at the changing backgrounds and Cap's face in them, it's hilarious), compared to a lot of art, I've rarely seen such a convincing portrayal of someone on the verge of tears. The rendition of Tony's teary-eyed face is literally the only nice thing I have to say about the art

Then the dialogue in this story is just a steaming pile. I adore Bendis, on a good day and on a title he cares about (eg. Ultimate Spider-Man) you get some of the most amazing, real and moving dialogue and scripts out there, but on a bad day where he's just phoning it in, you get some of the worst crap imaginable. That's what we got with Cataclysm and what we've got here, the dialogue is REEEAAALLY weak, the speech from Tony was repetitive and trite and everything is rushed, why this one-shot was double-sized so that things could actually be addressed is just beyond me. I have to admit though a lot was forced into this (and even then that speech still felt like it was padded out so it could last the entire issue for the sake of the story), but a heavily packed turd is still a turd, it's just smellier.

Kitty Pryde. Good god. We were just given the WEAKEST A**-Pull I've ever seen. Since cap stood down as President a while ago some secret president that's never been mentioned has secretly been fighting for mutant rights without this EVER being mentioned? Not only that, but because Kitty Pryde punched Galactus in the face (because science, don't question it) mutants will now be accepted by the public at large and everything is just fine?

For ****'s sake, we were getting some truly amazing stories from the Ultimate X-Men, a premise that was still ripe on the vine has now been thrown away needlessly. Not to mention that this in no way explains what's going to happen with regards to Utopia, all open mutants moved there and no new mutants can occur (Because China decided to make sure of that in the Hawkeye mini-series). There's no natural way of just undoing everything, so why do that? Milk Utopia a little before going back to the old way of things.

Well, they're uncountably going to be hitting this with some movie magic and the top half will look amazing on-screen, however I've got no idea what's going on with the puffy jumpsuit, I have to assume that it's there to support the giant shoulders that suit has, but there is no way I can believe that it's going to show that in the movie in any form. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's there to test what the upper half of the costume is like so that they can prepare to make the rest of the suit.

If my assumption regarding the suits construction is correct then I honestly have surprisingly high hopes for the film, if I'm incorrect... Dear God.

@comicstooge said:

@batmanfanboy said:

@comicstooge said:

@batmanfanboy said:

@comicstooge: Reed is technically dead and doesnt have a soul..

Really? O_o

Just because he doesn't have standard human function doesn't mean he isn't alive. It's not as if he's a zombie or something.

This is one of those really "iffy" things because it comes down to what a person's definition of "alive" is. Ultimate Reed has explained exactly how his powers work; when the accident that gave everyone their powers occurred the original Reed was destroyed and completely recreated as "pliable bacteria stacks" (that's a direct quote). This means that depending on how you classify consciousness and the idea of a soul (or the idea of the soul in the Ultimate Universe, which really hasn't been explored), the REAL Reed actually died and has just been replaced by bacteria that has been masquerading/believing itself to be Reed (something that Reed actually brought up himself before just kind of ignoring the idea and the questions it raised).

This means Ultimate Reed may actually be soulless. However, in the Main Marvel Universe (everything operates differently in different universes, so this probably doesn't have any bearing on things) clones can have souls (this was one of X-23's character arcs, it was flat-our answered in the disappointing "Circle of Four" storyline where X-23 (among others) is actually in Hell and Mephisto informs her that she couldn't be in Hell without a soul (reasonable logic, although Mephisto isn't exactly someone that can be trusted). So, if Clones can have souls and Reed is essentially a recreation of the real Reed made up of some fancy stacks of bacteria then does he count as a clone or does this bacteria not count for some reason and therefore doesn't get a soul?

F***ed if I know.

Or sales wise.