I've never been one to fear change, but reading The Ultimates: Homeland Security makes me wonder if that creeping illness of aging is starting to catch up with me because I don't like what Mark Millar's done to my favourite comic book hero and my favourite super team. 
 Now, I get that the Ultimates aren't the Avengers and that the Ultimates universe is some sort of weird parallel land or something, but no matter how we dress it up, The Ultimates is an attempt to "reboot" the Avengers in an age of reboots. The problem for me is that the rebooting hasn't added depth; instead, it has made the story shallow and seems to be taking Captain America and the Avengers back to the days of Rah! Rah! propaganda. 
 When Frank Miller gave us The Dark Knight, changing Batman forever, he took a glossy, rather silly, detective-style superhero and gave him real angst. The comic went from light weight action fluff, to heavy weight psychological drama, and that change was healthy. 
 But Mark Millar isn't doing the same thing here. The thing I have always loved about Captain America was that his ideals didn't always match the prevailing political mood. Captain America has often done what he thought was right even if it pitted him against his friends, the law or the government. He wouldn't follow orders just because they were given to him. They had to be right too. Yet, in the Ultimates we see him actively joining in the cover-up of Bruce Banner's identity as the Hulk, and even covering up the Hulk's intentional Manhattan tirade - a raging Hulk smash fest that killed several hundred New Yorkers - because to blow the whistle on the Reichstag Fire moment would cost SHIELD and the Ultimates their funding. The Captain America I know and love would never let that stand. 
 Captain American has always embodied American ideals, not American reality. We have Iron Man for that. 
 In the Ultimates, my Avengers have become a government run, government supported, government funded "defense system." Gone is their autonomy. Gone is their honour. They are government thugs working, quite literally, for Homeland Security, and suddenly Marvel Comics is beating the propaganda drum - and not all that subtly - for the Patriot Act and everything else that makes me sad about the USA. 
 I will give this series one more chance. I'll read one more graphic novel, but if it doesn't improve I will bury the experience deep inside and pray that this isn't the direction Joss Whedon's Avenger film is headed. That would be one of my saddest cinema experiences - ever.