I have my own personal comic book lending library in my best friend Jose. Last night, after watching the Super Tuesday returns come in on his giant screen, I got loaded up with books and headed home. On the train I took out one and started to read. It happened to be Ultra, which I found to be delightful.
The art is very clever and quite beautiful. Ultra and her fellow super-women are, of course, tall, statuesque beauties, but not in an unrealistic way. They don't have the anatomically impossible figures so often found in comics. They have flat stomachs and great legs, sure, but when they're off duty they wear real clothes and none of them have those impossibly tiny waists that are found so often in Barbie dolls and comic-book women. And the writing helps paint them as real women with weaknesses that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial elements. The dialogue is natural, realistic and at times laugh-out-loud funny.
I would have liked for the writing to give a bit more backstory on the characters, but the way the characters move through their universe it's quite easy to understand how their world works.
Throughout the collection are little biography articles that shed light onto the history and personality of the main characters, which is a delightful way to inform the reader without the use of clunky expositionary dialogue where the characters tell each other things they already know for the audience's benefit (a personal story-telling pet peeve of mine).
At the end, I felt like I had just watched a singular episode of a really good TV show, one which was self-contained and a complete story to itself but which also was connected to a larger story, and one I'd like to read more of.
Volumes 1-8 of Ultra by the Luna Brothers (Image Comics, 2005, ISBN 1852404836)
Four stars
No comments:
Post a Comment