WRITING FOR THE TRADE

Something occurred to me the other day that here on Comic Book Quickies we sometimes say that a comic has been written for the trade. I'm sure most of you that come here know what a trade is but if you don't then by that we usually mean that a comic's being written slow paced and usually about six issues to an arc. Most comics are like this these days. It means that it can be easily collected into trade paperback which are the comics you'll find in book shops like Waterstones or what have you. That's all fine and dandy but when we say a comics been written for the trade we mostly mean it as bad thing. See if you have been following our flagship series comic book quickies you'll see that we buy our comics weekly and when a comics been written for the trade its a bit of a bugger to read cuz these comics aren't self contained stories but are just one part of a larger story so it can take six to seven months to read a full story and that's a bloody long time. That's like half a year! It's not always a bad thing but it's most definitely a thing that exists.

So let's try something new! Lets do a comic book quickies for trades and lets start with the most tradey writer out there, Brian Michael Bendis and since there's a new Ultimate Spider-Man just starting out why don't we take a look at the very first volume of Ultimate Spidey?

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN VOL 1: POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY

Written by Brian Michael Bendis art by Mark Bagley

Yup it's ultimate Spider-Man's origin story alright. So firstly Ultimate Spider-Man is a retelling of the Spider- Man story set in an alternate world from the main Marvel universe. The Ultimate Universe came about when the Marvel big-wigs thought to themselves that their main line of comics had too much continuity behind it which made it hard for new readers to get into so they decided to make a new line of comics where everything was new and shiny. And so the Ultimate Universe was born. This might be one of the first trades I ever bought. It's basically my gateway drug into comics so it has done its job as being a good starting point for new readers. Basically it's Peter Parker in high school. And it is glorious. Most of the time.

As you would expect this first volume is Spider-Man's origin set in the modern day so instead of the spider that bit Peter being radioactive it's instead genectaly engineered. That's one of the things about the Ultimate Universe - most of the heroes and villains get their powers from science that was trying to recreate the super solider serum that made this worlds Captain America. So in this story it's Norman Osborn and his attempt at the super solider formula that created this Spider-Man and turned him into the Green Goblin and as we'll see in later volumes made Doc-Ock too. So it's pretty niffty that everything is all tied together like that at the start.

So we all know the story, Peter gets bitten, his beloved uncle gets shot by a dude he could have stopped earlier so he dedicates his life to fighting crime. That happens here over seven issues. See that's where the whole writing for the trade thing comes in. I couldn't imagine what it was like to read this when it first came out monthly, I mean it probably was still kick-ass but it just works so much better as a trade. See if you were reading this monthly then it would take you seven months for you to see Spider-Man actually fight the Green Goblin or about five months for uncle Ben to die. That's crazy! So that why it works better as a trade, instead of a seven month wait you can read it all at once making the story feel complete.

The characters are staggeringly solid and that's one of the benefits of the slow pace. Here we actually get know uncle Ben before he gets shot and yeah he's a pretty cool if a wee bit hippy-ish. UltimatePpeter Parker's pretty much the geeky wise cracker you'd expect and yeah he does have his emo teen moments even before Ben's death but he gets over it pretty fast. One of the really fun things that I thought was cool was that Peter actually enjoys having superpowers which may be a dumb thing to say but all to often in comics do we have people that are all like “I just wanna be normal!” man that kinda thing sucks. The Norman Osborn here is a bastard. That's pretty much it. Oh and he's green Hulk that can shoot fireballs. Yeah that pretty much it.

How could I get this far down without talking about the art? Well it's damn fine. Bagley's perfect for the book. It's all cartoony yeah but awesome cartoony and since it's a Bendis book it's always very talky, Bagley's art is perfect for that. It's so good and Bagley lasted for so long on the book it's not really worth talking about. The art in Ultimate Spider-Man is only a talking point when Bagleys not working on it.

So this is indeed a great trade and a great start to a great story that just gets better and better as the years go on. Shame Peter's dead now. Or maybe he's just hiding : D

BUY IT !!!