#whereas the pym stuff is just like. fairly openly what's on the page

[artbyblastweave]

How did Ultimate Marvel manage to be so good and so bad at the same time? Like on the one hand you have salient criticism of both the military industrial complex and the world of the mainline Marvel comics. But then on the other hand you have characters like Ant-Man and Luke Cage that getting butchered.

I've gradually come around to the stance that Millar's handling of Hank Pym in The Ultimates was "bad" largely in terms of the externalities it had for the character as a whole; If you like Pym, you're now generally up shit creek due to the extent to which the fallout from this story has marginalized the character in further adaptations, most predominantly the MCU. But in the context of the narrative of The Ultimates specifically, I think his characterization works incredibly well, and I think it's difficult to cleanly separate from what you're characterizing as the book's salient criticisms.

Part of the point of Hank's characterization is that everyone on the Ultimates- except Thor, we love Thor!- are deliberately "getting butchered," they're all horribly morally compromised in some way. These people are boots-on-the-ground in Iraq! Their first big legitimizing success was stopping one of their own guys going nuts! But Hank specifically gets the wall because he's morally horrible in an easily-recognizable, hard-to-spin way that there's a clear cultural script for condemning.... and nonetheless nobody bothered to do anything about the abuse going on behind closed doors for years, until their hands were forced by the bad PR of a high-profile incident. A thing that gets lost in the discourse churn is that the extent of Hank's abusive behavior is, within the progression of events, presented as an end-of-volume plot twist- for the first five issues and change, he and Jan are framed as an fairly legitimately happy and well-adjusted couple, and Hank himself is pretty well integrated into the team socially....until his ego is slightly bruised and the mask comes off and he vents his frustrations on the target of opportunity presented by his wife. The story is gesturing, with neon signs, at a Very Real Type of Guy, one that we've all probably been in proximity to at least once even if we weren't aware of it at the time. I also enjoyed the follow-up thesis of the subplot- that Steve's righteous golden-age chivalric retaliatory beatdown on Hank might be cathartic, but it's ultimately not going to solve any of the underlying dynamics that led to this situation in the first place. There are additional complicating bits of texture- Jan's closet-mutant situation and her status as the token minority in the initial Ultimates Lineup both feel like they're intersecting with this dynamic in a way that could be a whole separate post- but on the whole I've really come around on what Millar was trying to do with Pym, even if he was often doing it with his characteristic sledgehammer anti-tact.

Cage is different, but also interesting. The following would probably take a bit more involved research to lock down as a plausible read on what was going on editorially, but what I've come to suspect happened with Cage's deeply unflattering portrayal in Ultimates 2 is that Cage as a character was just barely beginning to exit a serious fallow period he'd been stuck in, and his portrayal in this represents the tail end of that. I've gotten the impression that during the 90s, Cage was viewed as a bit of an awkward figure who no one was entirely sure what to do with- viewed as a testament to the pitfalls of letting the predominantly white bullpen of the 1970s try to write dialogue for a black superhero. (The pastiche character of Buck Wild from Dwayne McDuffie's Icon is an example of this discourse making it into an actual comic book.) Cage wasn't nonexistent in the 90s, I've read some solo stuff of his from that period, but he's visibly not the fan favorite he'd grow to be in the 2000s.

As near as I can tell, his star seriously started to rise as part of the mainline Marvel Universe as a result of his inclusion in the supporting cast of Brian Michael Bendis's Alias from 2001 onwards, and he was cemented as a real setting regular by around 2005 with The Pulse and New Avengers; Ultimates 2, meanwhile, ran from 2004 to 2007 with some production delays. Given the timelines, it's plausible to me that Cage's one-note characterization as an unserious, mercenary second-stringer, participating on a team of the same, was conceived just before that stopped being the general read on the character. Equally possibly, it may have been conceived without any certainty that the stuff Bendis was doing with him was going to actually stick over the long haul; if New Avengers had flopped as a direction for the character, or if he and Jessica had ridden off into the sunset of editorial limbo after getting married, I think that Cage's portrayal in Ultimates 2 would be way less incongruous to a modern audience.

If they'd held off on using him a bit longer, he almost certainly have been part of the coalition of street-level heroes that show up part way through Ultimate Spider-Man; as it stands, his absence from that subplot is extremely conspicuous and easily the worst knock-on effect of his inclusion in Ultimates 2.