Ultra: Seven Days

by Joshua Luna, Jonathan Luna, Joshua Luna

Book Overview

In Spring City, where super-heroes blur the lines between law enforcement and celebrity, Pearl Penalosa, a.k.a. Ultra, is a workaholic. At the prestigious agency, Heroine Inc., she has earned a legion of fans, a nomination for "Best Heroine of the Year" and a perfect life. Well, almost perfect. A chance encounter with a mysterious fortune teller prophesizes true love for Pearl within seven days.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582404836
• ISBN13: 9781582404837
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Image Comics
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.7" x 10.2"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

A fresh take on some very human superheroes

The short version of this book is Sex and the City meets superheroes. In Ultra's world, superheroes are high profile celebrities represented by powerful companies like Olympus Inc and Heroines Inc. They have their commercial endorsements, their albums, their luxury cars and endless relationship problems. Fighting crime is an afterthought. Ultra, along with her two best friends Cowgirl and Aphrodite, is among the top-tier. She is a successful single woman stalked by tabloid reporters, pestered by her mom and unable to meet a normal guy. Her world is turned upside down when a fortune-teller predicts she will find true-love within 7 days. The script by Jonathan Luna is clever, the characters manage to sound like human beings rather than comic characters. The art by Joshua Luna does a good job with facial expressions, environments and action. The women actually have difference faces (rare in American comics) and he can do more expressions than the usual heroic grimace. Unfortunately he falls back on the lazy trick of repeating panels but only changing a minor detail like which ways the eyes point. After a while this becomes quite annoying. But the final product is a good take on superheroes with likeable and very human characters and a different take on superheroes.

And on the seventh day.....

On the surface Ultra seems targeted to young women and a guy can't get anything out of it. But you'd be wrong. Ultra tells the tale of the titular character and an eventful week in her life. it begins with night out on the town with her friends Aphrodite and Cowgirl, both heroines in their own right. and an visit to a fortune teller who gives each woman a prediction. As the week goes on a the predictions seem to come true. Ultra finds herself in situation after situation which pushes her to her limits. The story while a book about superheroes has little superhero action as story is more of what happens behind the cape. This was best written story I have read in a long time. If you are looking for change in the cape and cowl set and looking for break from the next big company wide story arc. ULTRA will fill that void and let you believe in original comics again.

Superheroes Made Real

Ultra is a superhero in a world more real than that of standard superhero comics. Here superheroes are celebrities and subject to all that our film and television celebrities are. Many heroes work in agencies that hire them out to work with the police and others. I found this very refreshing. As the story opens, Ultra and two other heroines are hanging out when one decides to check out a fortune teller. A little time and a lot of dollars later they have their fortunes and expectations. Each will experience their fortune sometime in the next seven days. Ultra has been told that she will find true love. At the urging of some of her friends she tries to enter the dating scene while managing her civilian and hero life. She must deal with criminals both ordinary and super, public opinion and yellow journalism, trust and betrayal. Somehow she manages to get through it all. By the end of the story we see how each fortune has worked out while learning a lot about this interesting world and its all too human characters. The reader is left wanting to read more and I hope more will be forthcoming. The art is excellent with a film-like feel with foregrounds or backgrounds being unfocused. I really liked the characters and the world they live in. Definitely one of the better comics out there.

A DIFFERENT LOOK AT SUPERHEROES

This trade paperbacks collects all eight issues of the Ultra Limited series from Image Comics. Ultra: Seven Days is a unique look at the superhero genre presented by Joshua and Jonathan Luna who plotted, scripted, drew, inked, colored, and even lettered this book. Ultra is one of the greatest female superheroes in the world. Superheroes in this story are roughly akin to professional athletes in our world. They endorse products such as soft drinks, cosmetics, and perfumes. They are represented by large public relations firms such as the Heroine Agency and they are the stuff of tabloid gossip. We meet Pearl Penalosa AKA Ultra. She is one of the most popular heroes in the world with millions of fans and admirers, a female version of Superman if there ever was one. She's even been nominated for Heroine of the year in a red carpet event as illustrious as the Oscars. She puts her duty before her own personal life. Pearl is out on the town for a night of fun with her friends Olivia and Jennifer (Also heroes known as Aphrodite and Cowgirl respectively) The trio pay a visit to a local fortune teller who looks every bit like a charlatan to get their fortunes told. It's there they learn that Ultra, always unlucky in love, will meet her true love within seven days. Pearl thinks the whole fortune-telling thing is pure nonsense, until she meets a regular guy that she falls head over heels in love with. Taking him into her confidence, although her real identity is out in the open as most heroes are, she has a steamy night of passion with him, only to find that he was a paid stooge, selling his story to a sleazy tabloid publisher, destroying Ultra's untainted reputation in the eyes of her legions of fans. Her agency immediately goes on damage control as her boss gives her the "I told you so" speech when it comes to watching who she associates with. Pearl now finds herself ostracized by the public and subject to taunts and insults from the people who once adored her. This leads to an ugly verbal fight between her and Olivia. On top of all of Pearl's personal problems, a new and very deadly villain has hit town. A superhuman pyro-kinetic who is using his powers to set devastating fires all over the city and taking a number of superheroes down who try and stop him. Ultra now has to pull herself together and forget her personal troubles to try and take down this threat before more people are killed. Ultra is a Superhero book, certainly, but the Luna brothers have constructed a Superhero book with dysfunctional characters that would make Stan Lee green with envy. Pearl is a workaholic hero obsessed with her clean image to the point of virtually having no private life. Olivia (Aphrodite) is an admitted nymphomaniac, unable to commit to a stable relationship. Cowgirl is naïve and insecure, always following the lead of others. Throughout the book the Luna brothers gives readers great renditions of faux advertisements and newspaper/magazine a