On Mark Millar & Steve Dillon's "Ultimate Avengers 3: Blade Versus The Avengers"

What is it that Mark Millar believes that the readers of the hardback collection of Ultimate Avengers 3 want in return for their £24.99? Mr Millar is, after all, a canny thinker, and by his own admission, he’s keenly aware of the need to identify and fulfill his reader’s expectations. As any sensible creator must be, he’s quite rationally concerned not just with story and self-expression, but with markets and consumers and commercial success.

Given that he’s very much a formalist, Mr Miller’s work always does carry with it a sense of how he judges the tastes of his audience. For although there are those who believe that Mr Millar takes little care with his comics writing at all, the slightest glance at the structure of his scripts shows how deliberate and purposeful his work actually is. For example, 4 of the six 23-sided chapters of  Blade Versus The Avengers contain precisely 4 splash pages each, with issue one having 5 and issue six having 3. The chances of this happening by accident are surely almost impossible. No, Mr Millar's work on Ultimate Avengers 3 is clearly constructed according to a well-defined model of storytelling. And so, each issue is divided roughly into 3 acts, each act is organised around an attention-snaring water-cooler moment, and each chapter contains at least 2 supposedly-shocking plot-reversals, one of which is always rather cunningly placed 3 or 4 pages before the issue's end, creating a double-climax for each of the parts of the tale. In short, Mr Millar is anything but a careless author. And so, it's surely safe to presume that the incredibly precise formula which guides his work here tells us a great deal about what it is that he thinks his audience is looking for. After all, a man who thinks that carefully about his craft is highly unlikely to have avoided thinking about the tastes of the consumers that his comics are aimed at. 

Of the 137 pages of Ultimate Avengers 3, 24, or 17%, are splashes, including the one above, which contains nothing but the information that the vampiric Captain America is digging his fangs into Blade. Once an artist would've been trusted to transmit the meaning of this in a single panel using skill and imagination. Now the data is delivered in an absolutely straight-forward, prosaic fashion, while the "punch" that the scene is meant to carry is supposedly conveyed by the fact that a whole page has taken up by it. In such a way has the full-page shot become little but a very big, comparatively empty and relatively expensive exclamation mark.

                
Where the evidence of Ultimate Avengers 3 is concerned, it seems clear that Mr Millar believed his audience would be largely uninterested in either the thoughts or the feelings of his characters. It's as if his desire to produce the superhero equivalent of a summer blockbuster pop-horror movie excused him from anything but the thinnest business of killing and threatening to kill off characters in unexpected ways, as if the barest bones of such a costumed killer-thriller strung across six chapters would somehow be satisfying in itself. In truth, the six chapters of Blade Versus The Avengers are concerned with nothing more human, nothing more emotional, nothing more touching, than the matter of who’s the hardest, vampires or superhumans, to which the answer is, of course and as always, Ultimate Captain America!

It's rather shocking to realise that Mr Miller is on record as having declared that he was keen to use his work on the Ultimate Avengers to go “a bit deeper into the characters”, because personality is the last thing that his scripts here are concerned with in anything but the broadest of terms. When Mr Millar does present the reader with the slightest hint of character in Ultimate Avengers 3, its sole intent is to mislead the audience about where the story is going to go. Because Blade Versus The Avengers is designed to do nothing more moving than surprise and shock, which in itself would be fine, if the shocks and surprises were delivered in the form of an inventive and dense narrative designed to reward the reader for their faith in the book's creative team.  Yet with an average of just 3.5 panels per page across the whole of the collected edition, and with the artwork in those frames most typically presenting us with utterly predicable and at-best efficient designs, what we have here isn't a story so much as an advert for one, a proposal for the spine of a tale which a truly ambitious and fully committed creative team might then have fleshed out together for publication.
             

And here is another full page splash from the next chapter of UA:3. Why is this page a splash? I have no idea. The shot is almost exactly the same as the one above, except that Blade is now weaker and a few guards have chanced upon the feast. In an incredibly competitive market where entertainment is concerned, Mr Millar and Mr Dillon have effectively given us one substantially dull splash page twice in 4 pages of the collected edition. Now, at what point was (1) excellence of storytelling and (2) value for money for the consumer of the slightest concern here?

          
And so, the first chapter here is purposefully set up to wrong-foot the expectations of a reader familiar with the conventions of the superhero sub-genre. We’re presented with two point-of-view characters, Blade, who will in truth have little of substance to do with the plot, and the new Daredevil, a teenage boy created to engage the audience’s sympathies not through his character, but through his given role of young superhero-in-training. (The boy Man Without Fear will have little to do the plot either, when it comes down to it. That's because the plot itself is so threadbare that it's merely a ramble from one jarring reversal to another.) The reader, presented with a blind boy enthusiastically embracing the life of a superhero in order to fulfil a mystic destiny, immediately expects to be following this lad through a rites-of-passage tale. But that’s all disinformation, and the misdirection is, it must be said, rather well done. When the new Daredevil encounters his master Stick being gorged upon by a vampire Hulk, the reader new to this tale, and therefore not stupefied by the endless parade of such incidents which lie before them, is surprised and yet also convinced that the young sightless hero will escape. After all, the narrative has already produced two unexpected moments in a single full page shot, with both ninja mentor and gamma-powered super-monster suddenly revealed to be fighting for the sharp-toothed other side; who'd expect a third contradiction of expectation at this point of the very first chapter? That the new Daredevil, who’s existed for just eight pages, and who’s been in costume for just three of them, should then be snacked upon himself is utterly unexpected, and Mr Millar has achieved his ends. Our assumptions have been contradicted, and our sense of where the plot is going has been completely undermined. 
           

Mr Millar's scripts famously lay the responsibility upon his artists to do much of his story's heavy lifting. In the above double-page spread, the Avenger's base is revealed to have been teleported to Iran. It's hard to think of an artist who might have turned such a thankless task into a spectacular, story-sealing moment, but surely no-one would've thought of laying such a responsibility upon Steve Dillon without having individual human beings informing the shot. Mr Dillon's skills have nearly always been shown to lie in the clarity of his exquisite storytelling and the delicacy of the emotions his characters display. His style as stands is not one which serves the cause of the spectacular. This is especially true when Mr Millar seems to be expecting the reader to be fascinated by a scene which has no human agency in it at all. There's no one to see this marvel through the eyes of, and there's not even any key markers to show us exactly where the Triskellion has ended up. It's just a vague uninvolving chunk of comicbook-architecture in a vague sand-covered locale. Wouldn't the two pages have been better spent playing to the considerable strengths of the artist, providing clear and involving establishing shots & details of character reactions, all of which would've rewarded the reader with a touch more narrative for their bucks? (With apologies for the cropped scan caused by the blogger's somewhat old and inexpensive scanner.)

        

But that misdirection is all that the creation of this Daredevil was concerned with. The brief glimpses we'd been given of the blinded boy who “tried a sip of orange juice …. and gagged like it was battery acid” were only there to fool us into thinking that we were going to be offered the chance to get to become acquainted with him. His fate is nothing but a knowing, cold-hearted joke designed to work as an unexpected punch-line spicing up an all-too-predictable narrative. And in that, the first chapter of  Blade Versus The Avengers succeeds in doing exactly what Mr Millar wanted it to. The reader was second-guessed when fangs unexpectedly drew super-heroic blood. But beyond the surprise and the PG spurt of blood from his neck, that's all that's been given. In that, the whole first chapter is little more than a set-up for an unremarkable if surprising jolt, and once that shock's been had, the story that's left feels remarkably thin. In that, it's certainly not an introduction which can bear any repeated reading.

It's a process of misdirection leading to "shock" which becomes incredibly tedious exceptionally fast. The metronomic predictability of Mr Millar's structure is so obvious from that point onwards that it's as if the reader is being taken for an idiot. Variety is very much not the ambition where Mr Millar's one-note script is concerned. As so, chapter two has Captain America being turned, and chapter three has Steve Rogers sinking his fangs into Blade. Chapter 4 sees the leader of the vampires killed, and by a vampiric Hulk-clone too, while chapter 5 sees Perun, the Russian thunder god, murdered. What counts for Mr Millar here is the bloody and supposedly unanticipated twist, the wise-crack, the splash page of the neck being broken, the story ending on a scene of
        

11 pages out of the first chapter of UA:3 is spent on introducing us to the young Daredevil, providing us with his background, origin, suffering, training and defeat. This single panel is all that we're shown of the death of his vampiric self.  There's not just a fatal absence of heart in this comic, there's a fatal lack of imagination too. This is all we see, along with a single panel of a burning Hulk-clone, of the end of an army of vampires in the desert sun. Who would throw away a spectacular moment, and a wonderful idea, like that with so little care and attention? But then, who'd choose to not show the end of that army and instead focus on the dullest double-page spread of the Triskellion instead?

ever-intensifying jeopardy and absurdity. After two or three consecutive examples of the same routine, it all stands as far less of a friendly wink to the reader and far more of a sneer; did we really pay $24.99 for this? Is this really what one of today's finest writers of the superhero book is now churning out as a legacy? Because by the time a giant super-soldier has killed another by stabbing him in the heart with a jet fighter, which surely ought to be one of the greatest and most absurd panels ever, the reader has already been utterly overcome with ennui.  No, Ultimate Avengers 3 is rarely more than an example of the most self-satisfied of storytelling disguised by spectacular piffle, of technique supplanting heart, of formula excluding meaning. It’s the ultimate triumph of a storytelling tradition which believes that superhero comics needn’t be concerned with character and emotion as long as they're peppered with bombastic moments designed to contradict and yet never challenge the committed fanboy’s expectations. And for a writer who claims to be disinterested in continuity, it's worth noting that Mr Millar's script of Blade Versus The Avengers works only because many of its key scenes run in a violently contrary way to the specific traditions of the Marvel universe proper. This is anything but an Ultimate comic aimed at the general reader. 

How much has the reader been rewarded for their presence, and their offering up of the cover-price, here? An entire page is spent telling us wordlessly that the fanged Captain America has been airlifted to HQ. This entire page could have been removed from UA:3 and nothing, nothing at all, would've been lost. It is quite literally a waste of space. It's not Mr Dillon hasn't done a competent job here; of course he has, he's an extremely fine artist. But what exactly was he being asked to do here that required a whole page to achieve?

        

This is what happens when the ironic and violent gesture obliterates any and all traces of emotion or thought beyond that aroused by a playground shout of golly-gee-whiz-look-it's-a-vampire-Captain-America! It’s the end-game of a comicbook market more and more obsessed with what unguessable thing is going to happen next rather than what action tells us about the characters involved. It’s the triumph of surface over substance, and in that, it thoroughly cheats the reader, because the implication is that spectacle can’t co-exist with intimacy,  that personality can’t flourish where great world-ending set-pieces do. It’s the easy way out, a comic book that can be written in next to no time at all, and it results in product which appeals only to the dwindling hardcore of fans who simply don’t care that Mr Millar could also have added scenes which were touching, and informing, and clever, and amusing, and structured to do something other than bawl out “Look at this!!! Argh!!! FOOLED YOU!!!”

Quite possibly the biggest wasted opportunity I can think of in any comic book at all. A wonderful conceit - a vampire super-giant is stabbed through the heart by a a skyscraper-tall colleague wielding a fighter jet as a stake - is quite thrown away. For not only is the book mired in one damn thing after another by this point, but the panel has had all potential markers of scale removed from it. As such, it looks like two athletes in jump suits, with one of them being poked at and punctured by a shiny paperweight.

           

Once the young Daredevil has served his purpose by being murdered, he disappears into the background of the tale, serving as just another stereotypical vampire. Any opportunity to wring some pathos out of the fact of a young life of promise cut so cruelly short is quite ignored. Daredevil is reduced to a boy vampire in a Bill Everett superhero costume, a gag which only the adept could extract very much meaning from. Even his death is a perfunctory business. He’s shown in the background of a single panel with his arm catching fire after he’s been teleported into the desert sun, and then he disappears entirely from the narrative, as is fitting, because he was never truly there in the first place.

There’s nought wrong with superhero books designed to be thinly-written, self-referencing punch-ups and nothing else, or rather, there’s not if both creators and consumers conspire to miss the fact that the former's cheating the audience and the latter's accepting narrative forgeries rather than well-wrought stories. For there’s surely no reason why big and apparently dumb tales can’t actually be unpretentiously smart too, no reason why such takes on the superhero narrative can’t be worked on and polished up until they carries far more than just a touch of surface flash and a

Yet another of the apparently-endless parade of splash pages in UA:3. Not only is it inexplicable that this beat of the story should require so much space, but the creators also ignore the faint possibilities for action in the scene. At the very least, the Hulk-Clone might have been shown lifting the weights from Cap with his lil'pinky or some such. As it is, this is all tell and no show.

sprinkle of continuity inversions. Why, isn't that what Mark Millar used to provide, month in and month out, with the likes of the original Ultimates? Yet as part of his farewell to writing for Marvel, Ultimate Avengers 3 stands as little more than page after page of a substantially gifted scripter slumming it, and that's a business that's almost as contemptuous of his own talent as it is of the folks who've ended up buying the book. As a framework for a fantastic story, what’s here stands as a promising start, a patchwork quilt of grand moments and a sense of a plot that progresses effectively, if somewhat tediously, from A to B. As a finished product, it’s shamefully thin, markedly lazy and appallingly complacent.

  

Yet another full page shot, yet another wordless page, yet another vampire having bitten yet another cypher of a victim. At best, it's a scene which required a panel. It's surely not a page.

    
.