A drunken evening ends at a fortune teller. Friends worry about true love, being considered "a slut," and the tabloids have a field day with one of them. Hardly the stuff of superhero comics in general, but the Luna Brothers successfully blend our media-obsessed culture with a girl power vibe right out of Sex and the City and a touch of superheroics for an engaging and amusing tale. Ultra is sort of the estrogen flipside of Powers, exploring the superhero as celebrity from the point-of-view of the celebrities in question instead of the bystanders or the cops, and the Luna Brothers capture the half-real/half-parody approach to the media and celebrity required to pull this kind of thing off. If a humorous, sexy approach to superheroines isn't enough to seal the deal, Ultra also has gorgeous artwork, reminiscent of the work of Josh Middleton on NYX.
There's no getting around it... Ultra is admittedly kind of talk-y. To be honest, I was almost put off by the first issue, which is essentially the winding down of a night on the town for three hot girls, and it reads at first a lot like a book that is trying really hard to be Sex and the City. However, once the superhero angle is revealed (on the last page of issue one), the book takes a more interesting turn, and becomes as much about how to live a normal life when you're famous, and about the intricacies of modern friendships, whether you're a man or a woman. Ultra is about super-powered scandal, but it's also about saying the wrong thing to a friend in the heat of the moment, discovering that another of your friends has been hiding something from you that's pretty important to who she is and trying to find the love of your life. It skews closer to the experiences from a woman's point of view, but there are plenty of universal themes for the guys as well.
Though at first I found the Lunas' patois to be a little bit too "you go girl" cliched, as the book went on, I started to really enjoy the dialogue as a fairly realistic look at how people like these would probably talk. There's some real wit to be found in the exchanges between Pearl and her awkward new beau, in the way that Pearl talks to her manager that shows their longtime friendship, even in the almost uncomfortably real anger and hurt that comes through during the fights or the revelations about Pearl's affair in the tabloids. Ultra has a strong plot through-line, examining the fallout of the fortune teller's prediction at the beginning and the crime wave of a pyrokinetic, as well as leading up to the big "superhero of the year" Oscar-style event, but it is first and foremost an emotionally-driven story.
Ultra is strong on structure, but it also has a lot going for it in terms of attitude and stylistic elements. Each chapter comes with a cover based on a familiar periodical, from Maxim to Time to People to a Silver Age comic book, and as a bonus, each chapter also features a little bit of the interior of that periodical. So we get Aphrodite's Maxim-style interview, Pearl's Rolling Stone spread and tabloid shame and other magazine style features that allow the Luna's to both poke fun at pop culture trends and reveal a lot about their characters and how they are perceived in their own world. There are also just neat atmospheric bits, like full-page ads from the Ultra world or dead-on mock-ups of magazine content pages, that help to set the tone of the book as an examination of the worlds of celebrities and superheroes.
Then there's the art. Although it took me a couple issues to really warm up to Ultra's story and see what the Luna Brothers were doing, the art hooked me from the beginning. A big part of the secret is the coloring, which has that bright, very defined look of animated cels, but there's also plenty to like about the Lunas' attention to detail, especially when they're depicting cityscapes and apartments and other mundane aspects of city life. The artwork captures the larger-than-life cool of a big city while still making it seem approachable and real. The emotions of the characters also come through well in the artwork. There are a lot of panels that, taken by themselves, could look a little ridiculous, as the Lunas use a wide open mouth to express surprise, joy and a number of other emotions, but these exaggerated poses work very well in conjunction with the rest of the story, giving the whole thing a terrific energy and flow.
In addition, Ultra is a sexy read. The Sex and the City comparisons aren't dead-on, but as the story focuses on three fabulous and beautiful girls in the big city who like talking about their sex lives, they are inevitable. And Aphrodite is pretty much exactly what you'd get if you put Samantha Jones in spandex instead of PR, unashamedly fond of sex and perfectly willing to talk about it even if others are uncomfortable. There's a memorable moment here involving a "popsicle" of sorts that had me laughing out loud, and it says a lot about Aphrodite's attitudes toward sex even while being a cute and funny moment. The Luna Brothers also get some mileage out of the old "Batman and Robin are gay lovers" gag, but they use it to deepen another character rather than just make a cheap joke. Then there's the reversal of the old "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" tale that causes Pearl a few moments worry after her night of passion (and a lot more anxiety down the road). The Luna Brothers bring in influences from comics and superhero lore as well as pop culture, and the results are different from anything I've read in comics before. 9/10
