Marvel just tore apart modern superhero media, leveling brutal criticisms and calling out “scripted quips“, “the illusion of change” and the use of AI, with some digs clearly intended to comment on the MCU itself.
The Ultimates #21 – from Deniz Camp, Pere Pérez, Federico Blee and Travis Lanham – is a biting satire of superhero media. The issue sees Luke Cage’s revolutionary Avengers go up against the Defenders – a propaganda exercise from the authoritarian Maker’s Council, clearly intended as a metaphor for everything that can be wrong with the genre.
The Defenders are fake heroes with made-up backstories, their exploits tweaked by AI to make them popular with the general public. Everything about the team is designed to appeal to audiences, delivering “super-powered spectacle without the politics” and imagining superheroes as agents of the status quo who’ll “do anything to protect your way of life.”
While the issue directly comments on Superman, it’s clear that its criticisms are also leveled at Marvel, with team founder Emmanuel Da Costa boasting that, “We’ve developed a full slate of live-action TV, summer blockbuster movies, animated half-hours, action figure lines, and more…”
The comic calls out the falsity of “clear, long-running storylines and interpersonal drama. Maybe a little light romance,” with “scripted quips and one-liners. Catchphrases!” These are all things that the MCU (and many of Marvel’s comics) have been accused of. The Defenders even use AI to edit their fights and seem more heroic, with the MCU facing criticism for its use of AI in 2023’s Secret Invasion and allegations surrounding AI use in Wonder Man and the marketing for Fantastic Four.
More generally, Ultimates criticizes the core concept of superhero stories as never-ending dramas where change is an illusion and the protagonists spend their time fighting to prevent any change to the status quo. That’s an accusation often leveled at Batman and Superman, but also at Marvel heroes like the Avengers, especially in the MCU.
From the beginning, The Ultimates has been a radical departure from Marvel’s mainstream comics. For a start, the series unfolds in real time, with each monthly issue representing another month passing in-world. The heroes also have a single goal in dismantling the global apparatus of the Maker, with the recent announcement that the entire Ultimate line will end in early 2026, definitively concluding its two-year arc.
More importantly, the series has included significant political commentary and criticism of real-world events, from weapon testing in the Pacific to white supremacist groups co-opting characters like the Punisher.
The Ultimate Universe’s heroes are on a mission to overthrow the entire world order after their reality was conquered by villains who utilize for-profit prisons, weapon manufacturing and political corruption to stay on top. However, one of the line’s most trenchant observations is that save a few costumes, a world ruled by supervillains looks eerily similar to our own.
Superhero media has often been accused of being inherently conservative and reactionary. The Marvel and DC Universes mimic the real world, meaning their characters can rarely achieve meaningful change, and end up defending the status quo rather than questioning it. Outside attacks threaten to change the world and the heroes stop them doing so, fending off aliens, monsters and foreign agents.
Even heroes like the X-Men – who are bound up in themes of oppression and disenfranchisement – never actually manage to change their station, at least never for very long. That doesn’t mean superhero media can’t ever be meaningfully progressive, but the deck is stacked against it, at least in the long-form, never-ending way that Marvel and DC comics usually operate.
This is intensified in adaptations like the MCU, where the spotlight is only more intense. Marvel’s movies need a much bigger, broader audience to pay their way, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, across America and all around the world. Simultaneously, several MCU movies have utilized assistance from the U.S. Department of Defense, with requirements like script approval attached.
As a result of these factors, the movies are stripped of what progressive commentary Marvel’s comics do offer, but retain the big, bombastic battles against outside invaders, leading to a deep-seated theme of protecting an acceptable status quo from change.
Movie fans will see Captain America fight foreign invaders of every stripe, and he might even uncover a few bad apples in positions of power, but he’s never going to proactively challenge American institutions or expose systemic problems with our way of life.
That can happen in the comics, but even there it’s relatively rare. With the Ultimate Universe, Marvel built a whole continuity on the concept of heroes tearing down an unjust world that looks just like ours.
The Defenders Are One of Marvel’s Best Ideas in Years
While the ‘Defenders’ name has existed in Marvel lore for years, The Ultimates manages to make this one of its most trenchant satires – the defining quality of how bad superhero media frames its characters: as protectors of what already exists, rather than warriors for a better world.
The Ultimates is currently regarded as one of Marvel’s best series, and here it’s clear to see why. The comic is full of sincere commentary and big statements about the world we live in, making it feel exponentially more urgent and important than the latest adventures of heroes who have been doing the same thing since the ’60s.
Unlike the MCU‘s big-budget movies that have to appeal to a record-breaking audience to justify their existence, comics are comparably freer to make big statements and even bite the hand that feeds them – something that The Ultimates just pulled off in commendable style.
The Ultimates #21 is available now from Marvel Comics.