In the year 2000, Marvel Comics was in crisis. The 1990s comic book bubble had burst, and readership was dwindling. Editorial needed a way to recapture audiences, and a hard reboot of the Marvel Universe seemed to be a good plan. Enter the Ultimate Comics imprint: a way to make Marvel’s flagship heroes younger, hipper, and more palatable to an audience more used to the storytelling conventions of cinematic spectacles than four-color newsprint. Ultimate Comics started out with blockbuster runs of Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men, but I’m not here to talk about that. I want to discuss The Ultimates – a reboot of The Avengers penned by controversial comics scribe Mark Millar and illustrated by Bryan Hitch.

The 2002 debut of The Ultimates proved fortuitous. America was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. This provided both a tense moment in the national psyche, and a fertile ground for satire and commentary on the increasingly nationalistic and militaristic attitude developing within the United States.

Ultimate Captain America proved to be the perfect avatar for the right-wing march to war. This is actually not all that far off from his original roots as a golden-age propaganda hero for the United States’ involvement in World War II. In the intervening years, Cap became more of a wholesome symbol of the “good old days” of America – all apple pies, baseball games, and lantern-jawed superheroics in defense of the little guy. Ultimate Cap comes full circle to his roots. He lives in a world of black and white, good guys and bad guys, and an unquestioning faith in the American Way. Ultimate Captain America solves all of his problems with his fists. He prefers a more straightforward approach to putting down the bad guys, like kicking the Hulk in the junk:

After finding out that Hank Pym is on the run after beating his wife, he confronts him in a bar and starts a back-alley brawl to make things even:

Earth-616 Captain America is Mr. Rogers with superpowers, believing in the fundamental decency of the common man. Ultimate Cap is Michael Bay driving a Hummer painted like an American flag into an hut full of Iraqi war orphans, berating them for being born in such a shithole country.

This might-makes-right, America-first approach to justice was a potent criticism of the unilateral war efforts in the Middle East that followed the 2001 terror attacks. We can see all the angles of the situation in retrospect, but at the time it was necessary for artists and left-wing commentators to call the administration to task for gung-ho warmongering. Much of America, like Ultimate Cap, just saluted President Bush and went along with his “cool” 21st century war:

There’s a toxic masculinity that pervaded both Millar’s Ultimates run and America in the mid-2000s. Cap beats the hell out of anyone who disagrees with him and is unquestionably nationalistic. When asked to surrender, Ultimate Cap retorts with this infamous line:

This tough-as-nails approach toward international justice may have worked in WWII, but lessons from Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East should have taught us that modern wars don’t really operate with clear good guys and bad guys. To be fair, Cap is saying this to a clear-cut bad guy – shapeshifting, genocidal aliens from another dimension do tend to be more clearly in the wrong than countries with valid political criticisms of United States foreign policy. But, Ultimate Cap’s militaristic approach to problem solving definitely mirrored what was happening in the international community at the time. Ultimate Cap, like Toby Keith, believes that a boot up the ass (or to the face) is the American Way:

The irony of the Ultimates is twofold: first, Millar is Scottish, but managed to precisely depict the quintessentially American macho swagger that saturated the early-00’s USA. Secondly, this criticism of why unflagging patriotism might be kind of a bad thing completely went over the heads of many readers. Millar said this on the subject in a 2013 interview:

“People would say, ‘I joined the army after reading The Ultimates because I wanted to make a difference in the Middle East,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I kinda meant the opposite of that,’” Millar recalled with a laugh.

We see the same kind of parallels today with law enforcement officers sticking a Punisher decal on their vehicles, or teen girls looking to Harley Quinn and the Joker as “relationship goals.” Comics are an excellent medium for commentary and criticism – if your audience gets it.