Al EwingUltimates 2 Vol. 1: Troubleshooters

Brilliant second edition of the highly recommended Ultimate comic book

Ultimates 2 Vol. 1: Troubleshooters  collects the first six issues of this second series. This continues the team’s story from the first series, but also gives it more focus, as the members are brought together to work for Galactus, and not the US Government.After Jonathan Hickman’s run on the Fantastic Four, I wondered in my review of the final volume just how you could follow that, as he’d taken them to the very edge of reality. Well, as it turned out, nobody could, and the series folded, though Mr Hickman had an encore for them in Secret Wars, and finally took them beyond the edge of reality.This team is now back on that edge, and looking beyond it too, so I wonder if the FF will be coming back somewhere down the line, as this writer certainly has the imagination for it. This story takes them into Doctor Strange / Jim Starlin territory, and does it very well. Unfortunately, the artwork, which is obviously trying to do something different to portray higher-dimensional beings doing higher-dimensional stuff, looks like the sort of screen-capture stuff we see in the digest books that are reprinting the TV CGI series (Spider-Man, Guardians, Avengers, etc.), and while it is certainly doing things differently, I’m not sure if it is working for me. Gene Colan, Steve Ditko and Jim Starlin could do this sort of stuff with just a pencil and imagination; they didn’t need a computer with the power of Brainiac 5 to end up making it look like a kid’s TV cartoon.The story, however, is still managing to keep it all working and me reading: this really is the current Marvel Cosmic book, building on everything that has gone before, but remaking it all for the new universe.