Vols. 1 & 2 are out in paperback and the paperback of vol. 3 is coming out in February. (On Valentine's Day according to Amazon.

ZenKitty, he is indeed supposed to be the Herald of Galactus in the movie. As to "why a surfboard," well, things were different in the '60s...

Frankenbuddha - yeah, 6 issue. Preview pages here: [link]

I got into a conversation with a friend about the Ultimates line, and now I'm thinking about going back and reading Spidey from the beginning of Ultimates. Is anyone following the run of Civil War? I'm surprised at how intrigued I am, but I suspect it is at least in part due to my lingering displeasure with Crisis.

Civil War is making me angry. In a storytelling sense, they are literally breaking their world. I have no idea how they are going to turn this off without a complete and total asspull.

I'm skipping around among titles I like, but the conflict has been presented in such ridiculously black-and-white terms that they might as well have substituted Victor von Doom for Tony Stark.

Oh, and since Millar is the brain behind the whole story, I suspect it will end with some giganto weapon being used to sodomize someone. They did have Mjolnir appear in the lead-up to the event, didn't they?

Heh. I don't doubt that for a moment, Matt.

Question: do you think it's living up to the critical hype as a commentary on the current political situation in the US? I confess, that's part of why I'm thinking of investing the time in reading it. But I'm curious to know what you think.

Honestly, it's so ham-fisted that if you haven't been reading up to this point, you probably shouldn't bother.

As far as Ultimates go, I absolutely love Ultimate Spidey. Ultimate X-Men has a good run for a long while (barring some absolute crap artwork for a couple of issues), but I nearly dropped it a couple times last year due to blah story and inconsistent art, but the story has picked back up and managed to keep my interest lately, even if the artists are still going through a revolving door.

As for the actual Ultimates comic, I stopped reading after the first run. I like Ultimate Cap and the "Is he really the god of Thunder or just a deranged mutant?" angle on Thor, find the Hulk as pure Id interesting and am pretty much neutral with most of the other characters, but I absolutely loathe Bruce Banner, Betsy Ross and Henry Pym in those comics, and that loathing prevents me from wanting to read any more about that team.

Haven't been following Civil War at all. After Infinite Crisis, I'm pretty much burned out on gimongous comicbook world-changing events and I totally don't buy Peter Parker revealing his identity to the world, ever.

Civil War has been driving me crazy. I can buy the premise, but the characterizations of Iron Man, Reed Richards and Capt. America are compeltely off ... it's like they've been robbed of their reason and their nuance, as though everything that happened before this didn't matter. I can actually see Cap taking such a drastic stance, but not being so cold to old friends. The Cap I know would be constantly trying to reach out to the other side -- and 90% of the heroes out there would never be able to bring themselves to oppose him. For Tony and Reed's part, I can't believe for a second that they wouldn't be opposing this whole thing -- Reed, particularly, has never seen eye to eye with the government -- and that they wouldn't be using their influence to come to some more reasonable accord.

But there have been a few bright spots. Particularly Spider-Man ... I'm remembering why I used to love him so much.