fumes / refuel

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Running on empty and well and truly stuck in the main things (my fault for working two things too similar to one another yet also quite different – but not different enough, apparently) so I'm making an attempt to bring back The Etudes, with specific rules sourced from other, earlier attempts at an "unsticking" exercise: 50-100 word fictions, written and published in two days (Mon/Tue or Thu/Fri)... and that's all I've got. Will probably add more specific rules to each individual piece to meet the moment of the required unsticking. Thinking of this, from Rick Rubin's THE CREATIVE ACT:

"There are no bad rules or good rules. Only rules that fit the situation and serve the art, or those that don't. if the goal is to create the most beautiful work possible, then whatever directives are truly in service to that end are the right ones to use... they can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work."

This being the theory.

THE ULTIMATES 2, No. 6 (Millar/Hitch; Marvel, 2005)

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Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review / memory / whatever. Earlier installments live here.

(Box18): Part of my second era of comics collecting (first being early-mid nineties – basically BATMAN ‘89 through KINGDOM COME, second being 01/02 until +/08, the third being a recent return): I'm certain I picked it up on the Wednesday it came out, which would put it at sometime in late Spring/early Summer 2005. Boston, Newbury Comics – probably the Harvard Square store, though by that point it might have been the one outside of Belmont, MA, near Alewife. Actually, now that I think about it... yeah, probably the Alewife one, the first location, before they moved across to the Whole Foods shopping center (or was it the other way ‘round?) .

As far as the story itself, a solid enough interlude – for all of Millar’s overt Millarness, he could always tell a ripping good yarn – featuring some beautiful – as always – Hitch art focused on the cancelled Hank Pym as he joins the Ultimate Defenders and engages in a downward spiral of self-pity and self-flagellation before getting his sixty-foot-tall bare ass splayed across the Ultimate newspapers when he uses his Giant Man powers (in defiance of the U.S. government's ownership of them – "I'm kind of in a legal dispute with them right now") to save Ultimate Nighthawk from being incinerated by a gang of cigarette-stealing hooligans and meeting with a shadowy traitor to the Ultimates team to kick off the "Grand Theft America" storyline.

Fond memories back in the days of yore and innocence, in the years just prior at the start of the MCU – in the pre-Disney years, even –, of how the MCU was (going to be) inspired by The Ultimates and The Ultimate universe: other than Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and the Chituri (sp?), I fail to see the provenance – or the willingness to take anything resembling a risk.