Ultimates Volume 3.

For those who’ve not read Joe Madureira’s fairly awful comeback comic, Ultimates Volume 3 Issue 1, his art has been coloured by Christian Lichtner in an style opposed to the flat colours his work had in the 90s. There’s been some talk in reviews about how the colours don’t fit the art, and make Madureira’s weak layouts murky and unclear. Those latter points are quite true, however the colours do fit the art. At least they do if you take into account Madureira’s influences.

All the work of Madureira’s that I’ve encountered (the first being that issue of X-Men where Storm tears Marrow’s heart out) has been influenced by manga and anime. However his interpretation of his influences are superficial at best, and he often uses them to detrimental effect. For instance in the Ultimates 3 #1, there’s a page where it looks like Hawkeye is bursting out of a panel, facing away from the character he is addressing. He did this plenty of times on his X-Men run (to better effect too) and what Madureira appears to be attempting is something Rumiko Takahashi frequently did in Ranma 1/2 and have the first panel on a page be a long, borderless, background less, full body portrait shot of a character entering the scene that takes place on the rest of the page. Madureira however has too much space filled in behind Hawkeye so he looks like he is escaping the page, rather than walking into the following panel.

So back to the colours.

My theory is the choice of the overly rendered colours provided by Lichtner is down to another of Madureira’s influences – Masamune Shirow.

The colouring we have in Ultimates 3 seems to have be chosen due to the Shirow influences in his earlier work (most glaringly the appearance of The Major’s haircut on the head of both his Storm and AoA Rogue). In terms of the actual art work of the book, the Shirow influence is most obvious in his redesign of Ultimate Valkyrie. Lichtner’s colouring on the book is very similar in style to Shirow’s later colour work, though Lichtner is positively subdued compared to Shirow’s frequent tendency to give everything an oily sheen.

However, while I can see a reason for the choice of colours, it doesn’t work in the slightest. Previous colouring of his art has tended to be flatter and more cartoon like. Which suited it far better than his Lichtner’s does, as for all his attempts at employing manga conventions he doesn’t quite understand, Madureira’s influences from cartoons and anime come through far more in his art.

Ultimately (pun intended) Madureira/Lichtner’s art really doesn’t matter that much as Loeb’s script just plain stinks.