It's the evening of Dec.4 as I type this. Earlier today, in my capacity as a newspaper reporter, I covered the sentencing of a man who sexually assaulted two little girls repeatedly over the period of a few years. Last week, I watched as a jury found another man guilty of a rape he committed a quarter of a century ago. Within the past month, I wrote about a civil lawsuit being brought against a former RCMP officer, alleging he sexually abused several boys decades ago when they were inmates at a youth jail. I see sex crimes processed through the justice system on an almost routine basis. Sometimes justice is done, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes, there's no way to tell.
What I don't see, though, are the injustices, when crimes and victims are ignored. Rucka explores one such scenario here in a powerful story that explores the human sides of the title characters and not the superhuman, adventurous ones.
Trey, the son of a wealthy man with political influence, has sexually assaulted a fellow Columbia University student. The victim does everything right... she turns to the police and turns to her friends -- including Elektra Natchios and Matt Murdock -- for emotional support. But all signs indicate that Trey is going to get away with it thanks to who his father is while what he's done is buried. Nothing is more important to Elektra than her friends and family, and she finds she cannot contain her anger.
I'll mention it only briefly here, but it needs to be said (as it no doubt will be extensively in the days to come): Marvel's new super-floppy, slick format for the Ultimate line of comics stinks on ice. I don't know if it does anything for the artwork reproduction, but the flimsy feel of it makes the issues seem... disposable. Maybe Marvel is trying to drive some readers to the trade paperback format, I don't know. My initial reaction was that it was cheap and robbed the book itself -- not the storytelling -- of some measure of value. No wonder Marvel didn't include any of this week's three Ultimate titles in its First Look packages.
We're halfway into this book, and the character who gets top billing is really little more than a minor supporting character. And I like it. Rucka's exploration of an everyday, down to earth Elektra is a welcome change of pace, and I'm pleased that the carte blanche of Ultimate continuity provided the opportunity for it. Elektra stands out as an exceptional person, not just in terms of physical prowess, but emotionally. Her loyalty, passion and outrage paint an admirable and attractive picture. I hope that this is the sort of Elektra we see on the big screen when Daredevil debuts in February.
