More Human than Human

by AJ JAZZY D

     What the heck is a super-hero?  Well, that’s a whole thing, but the short version is that when Sci-Fi met pop-media the characters reflected hopes and fears of the technological age.  In the 1950s and 60s comic book heroes were the prophets of mankind’s trans-human future.  Surely, atomic power was at this era’s core, and heroes were always getting bombarded with radiation or transformed in experiments.  But today is a new era, and Marvel has been re-writing the universe(s) to fit in, the Ultimate Marvel line has been a more careful approach to the transhuman tomorrow:  a tomorrow where genetic enhancement, super-drugs, and nanobots will make a select few the “ultimate human.”  With Ultimate Origins, Marvel may unify the Ultimate Universe under the transhuman/superhuman theme and bring comics into this new era.
     "The Marvel Universe was born out of nuclear paranoia," Brian Bendis told CBR News. "Clearly, that's not what they were thinking when they created it, but if you look at the origins you see all that irradiation and fear of mutations.”  One can’t argue with, but the super-hero was more.  Nowadays, you have entire teams with mere physical combat capabilities, like the New Avengers where Spider-Man’s webs, crawling, and pre-cog make him the most powerful character on the team now that Dr. Strange is gone.  Everyone seems to punch everything.  And everything is a war.  War on crime, battle for truth/justice, civil war, war games, secret wars, infinity war, and on and on; characters seem to have lost the edge they had when they first appeared and now just get into one boxing match after another or face yet one more god-like foe they have no business being in the same panel with.  No, super-heroes should be more than technoparanoia-spawned he-men having at each other a top a skyscraper.  One has to give the illuminati some props for being more than rock-em-sock-ems.  The trans-human heroes are leaders, kings, but forty years later the future seems to have stalled.
     On the other hand, the Ultimate U doesn’t suffer from the “hey, Reed Richards been at this for decades and the world still sucks” reaction picking up a Marvel title in the 1990s could bring.  The new era is populated by computer literate, tech savvy readers not as impressed with “gamma rays” or the random alien.  Bendis explains, “…[T]hat's not really the world we live in now. We don't live with a Cold War but there are certain things about our society which would indicate a genetic paranoia would be in line with what's going on now. People are scared of cloning and chemicals. So we thought, 'Okay let's make it about that.'”  Frankly, Ultimate U has done a good job, until recently, keeping the characters full and real.  And the limited series structure has kept the stories from being watered down, at least for now.  Genetic mutants reads better than “the children of the atom” to this century’s readers  Ultimate Origins promises to spill all on Fury, Logan, and the rest—stories within a bigger story.
     Bendis goes on, "From there it becomes a lot about the Super Soldier and war, with people chasing the super soldier idea.  We wrote a lot of our ideas down but they were mainly just for us to know. We could hint at things and Mark did it a lot. I also did a lot of hinting in the 'Ultimate Marvel Team-Up' series, especially with the Hulk issues. So there's a thread that connects these characters in a big way.”  Instead of a WMD race, it’s the Persons of Mass Destruction race.  There’s something pleasant about the interconnectivity of Ultimate U.  Starting with the first mutants and Captain America, the world has spun wildly into world of trans-human threats from every corner.  Metaphorically speaking, the U.S. was a little adrift, the attempts to recreate the super-solider serum had failed and finally brought them the Hulk, and only the return of the greatest generation in the form of Cap’ pulls it together into the form of the Ultimates. 
     But in doing so, the Ultimates start a new world where villains aren’t just popping up and trying to pommel the good guys.  When the PMD pushback comes, it’s funded by shadowy groups but motivated by major moves like the US using Ultimates power to sweep a nuke program off the map.  The Liberators show up and push the Statue of Liberty into the drink and make a real show of what a super-human war is like.  Whereas Marvel U was built book by book, Ultimate U started out with an eye toward tying everything in.
     Origins is suppose to lead into the Ultimatum storyline which is rumored to be “Ultimate house of M,” but the main point is something like the technological singularity.  What is that?  Remember when Sarah Conner and Uncle Bob talking about the moment that SkyNet became self-aware?  That’s it, that is the point where technology jumps and someone or something suddenly is so far ahead of one else they might as well be flying an Apache at the battle of Yorktown.  The first issue the Invincible Iron Man touches on this idea since Stark says his fears are that someone else would control the armor, or worse, someone would make it cheap, mass produced, everywhere.  “With great power…” and all that doesn’t work when you can buy a mind control device on Ebay.
Origins should be good—it needs to be good, and not just one of these teasing, patchwork-plots we get in some books.  Super humans may not be here just yet, but if they ever arrive what makes us think they’ll be superheroes?  Many compare superheroes to mythic heroes and gods, and the idea works at least in the sense that when someone actually becomes transhuman they will be god-like.  What morals or laws will they have?  Who will they protect?  Are we safe from them?  When the Super Human Arms Race began with Captain America these questions and who and how they answered them created the Ultimate Universe.  “A war is coming…,” to quote Magneto and Origins should be the perfect lull before the storm.  Plus, the make up of the Ultimate Universe obviously (see the Iron Man ending) effects the movies, so it should tell us what new directions we find on the screen.