The Ultimates, and the Ultimate continuum as it exists in the modern Marvel continuity grew out of the immense and overwhelming success of the Ultimate Spider-man continuity. A stylized, teen-centric and visually slimmer version of Spider-man, Marvel soon attempted to replicate its success in its other properties, expanded the universe to encompass both the X-men, and a short-lived teenaged Iron Man. Out of this property came Marvel's Ultimate version of The Avengers: The Ultimates.
Featuring reinterpreted avengers characters, new nervous tics and character flaws, and a neo-realistic art style, The Ultimates was (at least in my view) an unqualified success. Modern, dark, and ripe with potential, I looked forward to a continuation of the series and waited anxiously for the next of the books.
Which brings us to Ultimate Power. Ultimate Power, a mash-up of sorts within the new Ultimate continuum, brings together all the superheroes of the world into a largely incoherent plot centered around Dr. Doom as an arch-villain again. While artwork is largely phenomenal, there is a problem that comes to light due in no small part to the realistic quality of the art and that is this: the women.
Perhaps due to the innate scarcity of women to be found in comic books to begin with, perhaps the first problem with this book is that there are just too many of them: they fill up the frame. Now before anyone starts launching the slings and arrows of misogyny my way, let me clarify: all female stories are fine, but not when they're all supermodels who appear to revel in ridiculously scanty clothing. It's not even that I object to it it's just that in these pseudo-realistic portrayals, with fairly anatomically correct male and female models, to depict exclusively slender, supermodel figures on ALL WOMEN seems immensely unreal.
Stylization allows you a great deal of freedom. In a stylized media sexualized portrayals of women gel easier: it's stylized, real women clearly aren't this sexy and real men clearly don't have several hundred tumors running all over their muscles. But in realistic portrayals like the Ultimates, this doesn't quite gel anymore. Most especially when the poses and the clothing these women strike hit closer to T&A portrayals than actually realistic poses. These aren't women, they're softcore models; but they exist alongside realistic portrayals of men so we are supposed to accept this standard of femininity as normative and in concert with the realistic portrayals of the male characters.
And this creates the cognitive dissonance
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