Break out your buttered popcorn, and sixty-four ounce cola beverage, Mark Millar is bringing fun back to The Marvel Ultimate Universe.  Don’t get me wrong, Loeb’s run was intended as fun, and he did some really ballsy things, plot-wise, but his character interactions and dark pronouncements were…not exceptionally good.  Not exceptionally bad, for that matter, but they made me happy that he only had a five issue run there. 

Millar comes at you with eight guns in each hand, and all sixteen barrels, uhhh, barreling down at you.  Thus far in the story we’ve got Captain America, a politically neutered Nick Fury, Tony Stark, Hawkeye, and the new head of SHIELD, Carol fucken Danvers.  And bad guys?  Oh, there’s AIM for starters, and then there’s, oh my stars and garters, Red Skull.  Fun!  All we need to complete the experience of the summer blockbuster movie is a last page reveal that makes you wet yourself a little with glee.  And BOOM there it is, right on the last page.

The only potential drawback I see to this story is that Millar seems incapable of putting out two issues of a comic in a six month period.  The last issue of Kick Ass came out April 22nd.  The next one is due out September 2nd, which means it will probably showup in October.  The last issue of Old Man Logan came out on May 22nd, and the next issue is due out on September 23rd (so, maybe in 2010?).  I hope that this series proves to be the exception, because it’s obvious that Millar has lots of fun mucking about in the Ultimate Universe, and I have a lot of fun following his journey.  Still, this might be a series you want to pick up in trade, just so you don’t have to torture yourself with three or four month gaps in the story.