Note: I did not actually read The Ultimates Omnibus as my title and link might otherwise indicate; I just re-read the four volumes of The Ultimates and The Ultimates 2 that I have mentioned previously, but this seemed like the easiest way to get away with treating it as one project, so soon after I had read them individually. And in short, I want to say that I was right to go back and reread them, as seeing the Ultimates in their proper context over the evolution of that universe would have made a lot more sense than seeing everything at once right when I started, and then going back in time to see them interact with the rest of the series in progress as I variously caught up to “current”.

As for the books themselves, though? Still good, and they certainly do stand alone, if you wanted to ditch the rest of the universe to just read these. They’re by far the most adult books, both in theme and in prose. And certainly in plotting, where they occasionally seem to go above and beyond the adult theme cut-off just to show they can. But since almost every other main character in the Ultimate universe is mid-late teen in age, it makes sense for the one adult group to make a point of doing adult things. Anyway, it rarely seems to actually pander, which I guess is close enough for me. Also, the art is always good, though it strikes me funny that both the Wasp and the Scarlet Witch have violet eyes. The odds just seem implausible, is all I’m saying. So, like I’ve doubtless said in previous reviews that I don’t feel like digging up: if you like adult-oriented[1] globe-spanning events with real emotional and physical consequences, this is the place to get them. (Because Wolverine can’t be the star of every X-Men comic, and really, who else is there besides him and these guys to count as adult?)

[1] For the most part, non-pornographic.

I kind of feel like Ultimate Origins was a risk. Okay, the continuity had only existed for about nine years at that point, plus I think they already knew that they were headed towards an ending of sorts. But still, taking even a mere nine years of continuity and then going back and finding a way to tie it all together in meaningful and unexpected ways, without accidentally being ridiculous? It’s a fine line to walk.

But what am I talking about? It turns out that the Ultimate universe, about which I talk from time to time, has some important and unrevealed information from the World War II era that spawned the original super soldier project and ultimately Captain America, and also from the generation that precedes modern times / the current crop of superheroes and mutants. Information that has strong relevance to mutantkind and its imminent war on humanity. Information of particular interest to one Peter Parker on the topic of his dead parents, if only he knew it.

All the same, I’m pretty sure that, if it hadn’t been written by Brian Michael Bendis, it would have been ridiculous after all. So yay for the author they chose!

The majority of one-shots in the Ultimate universe have not been all that good. Of course, the majority of them have been about Daredevil and/or Elektra, and while those stories may be good spread out over years, I have yet to see the short term version do them justice, even though both characters work just fine as guest stars to Spider-Man. Ultimate Human, however, is an exception to that one-shot rule. Card’s Tony Stark retcon has finally taken hold, and the world’s smartest man seems like the best person for Bruce Banner to turn to in finally beating this Hulk thing once and for all. Over the course of four issues, the two men finally change the Ultimate version of Bruce Banner from caricature into a genuine character, while clashing with each other mentally and physically. And because one foe is never enough, a giant-brained person that you may remember as the Leader is waiting in the wings.

Oh, and incidentally? With an entire issue given to origin and backstory, the Ultimate Leader is exactly the kind of character reintroduction that the Ultimate universe does so poorly in general and should have been doing this way all along. I wish people who are not named Brian Michael Bendis could do a better job of accomplishing this on characters that I haven’t already seen elsewhere.

A tried and true way to annoy fans of a series is with a drug metaphor. There you’ll be watching [spoiler elided] perform magic, getting better season after season, even earning a girlfriend out of it, and then suddenly in the sixth season, it turns out that [spoiler elided] has an addiction to magic that must be stopped any any cost, lest lives be destroyed. Or in the Ultimate X-Men, say, there’s Colossus, this big steel guy, but it turns out he’s been doing drugs all along to be strong enough to support his impenetrable skin. And now all of his friends are addicted too, and the ones who aren’t had better step in and save the day! Oh, and also, it’s time to introduce another half-dozen Marvel characters that you won’t be able to care about unless you already know who they are, because heaven knows we certainly don’t have enough time to actually introduce them and find out if they make any sense or should be cared about, before they’re gone again.[1]

It’s too bad, too, because without the rush job, well… I mean, the drug thing still would have annoyed me. Ongoing series of every flavor really need to stop with that shit, because it is never done well. Ever. But, without the rush job and the drug-story allergy, the last couple of pages of climax, dramatic revelation, and cliffhanger would probably have been pretty cool. Instead of feeling excited about what comes next, though, I’m mostly glad that Absolute Power is the last Ultimate X-Men book I have to read.

[1] That right there is the biggest problem with the Ultimate line of comics, in a nutshell. If you’re going to pretend to be shedding forty years of continuity so that new readers can join the fun, then stop letting your stable of writers add in old characters unless they promise to tell me who they are and why I care. Or, better yet, make me care within the confines of the plot. I know that’s not that hard to do.

One of two things happened between my readings of Ultimate Iron Man and Ultimate Iron Man II. Either the writing got a lot better, or I relaxed about the continuity weirdness and accepted that this whole prequel thing could be true after all without breaking anything that has happened later in Tony Stark’s timeline. Regardless, the upshot is that I got to enjoy this book lots more, and yay for that! Despite being labeled and numbered as a new series, it picks up right where the last one left off; Tony is using his new experimental armor to fight against bad guys and his father is in jail, framed for the murder of a rival arms manufacturer. The story adds in a few new twists that work well as prequel fodder, including government agents who want Tony’s new “robot” and continued visits to the pre-Richards Baxter Building. But mostly it’s a straightforward murder mystery set at the highest levels of corporate espionage and global terrorism. The man inside the Iron Man suit may be far more powerful than I’m comfortable with, but his story is always funny and never boring, so I can cut a little slack on my complaints this time.

Card has still come nowhere near a connection point between this ongoing origin story and the Tony Stark that joined the Ultimates way back in the second issue of that comic, and I suppose now that the Ultimate series has ended and been rebranded, perhaps he never will. Despite my previous complaints, I have to be a little disappointed by that, as the characters were really starting to pop. At least I’ve got something like 40+ years of main sequence Marvel continuity to read, so I don’t have to feel too sad about it.

I have thought about mentioning for a few books now as it kept getting coming up (but then ultimately never did so) that things have changed within S.H.I.E.L.D., the organization that is mostly concerned with terrorism, superheroes and supervillains, and the management thereof. Good old Nick Fury, one-eyed ass-kicker extraordinaire, based on Samuel L. Jackson for the appropriate level of badassery right out the gate, has gone missing and is no longer in charge of the Ultimates or much of anything else. And people keep talking about how weird it is that he’s missing and wondering if he’ll ever come back. I had been expecting something along the lines of Ultimate Power to come along and explain this to me, and not only was I right, but it turns out I should have actually opened it earlier in my readthrough; who knew it came out in a hardback version first? (Must definitely re-order these books correctly, once I finally have the missing X-Men volumes back.)

Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is working on a promise to change his friend the Thing back to human form, because being a giant rock creature is just not very pleasant for some people, even when they’re stronger than just about everyone and practically indestructible. As part of that project, he sends a handful of probes into several parallel dimensions[1] in search of scientists willing to assist him, against Nick Fury’s explicit orders. Naturally, moments later[2], angry superheros from one of these other dimensions[3] appear to arrest Reed, because his probe nearly destroyed their planet. Being a stand-up guy, he agrees to be arrested and tried; being a master tactician with Marine sensibilities, Fury immediately mounts a rescue operation including pretty much every good character in the Marvel universe. And then, you know, things explode or generally go down in strange ways.

The story was pretty okay if you can get past only being able to follow the two-thirds of it that involved Ultimate characters. But it had massive continuity problems. Because, all the people wondering where Nick Fury has gotten to, in other books? They were in this book to see. Also, there’s a completely inexplicable appearance by a character who, last I knew of, should not have been available for this particular event. But writers sometimes do things because they’ll look cool without worrying about whether it makes much sense. And this did look cool.

[1] Not unlike the N-Zone that he was running teleportation tests through when he accidentally created his group’s superpowers in the first place.
[2] Probably, it took longer? Comics as a medium can fail to properly express the passage of time.
[3] I took a little while to catch up here, as none of these characters was familiar. Apparently, they are meant to be a crossover from a different current Marvel series about the Supreme universe, in which all the heroes are ripped off from DC. It is not clear to me why this would be compelling, but there you go.

It is with something very like relief that I report Ultimate Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends as merely good. Over the course of a few mostly light-hearted adventures, Peter and his classmates interact with the Human Torch and Iceman (plus several other X-Men from a very slightly different continuity to the one I’m reading about in Ultimate X-Men[1]) while dealing with such issues as a classmate’s newly activated mutant gene or the perennial high school parenting assignment that seems to only exist in fiction. You know, the one with the doll that the “parents” trade back and forth and keep details of, and sometimes the doll also reports on its own status via sophisticated electronics, and sometimes the doll is an egg that you would think is a chicken egg but turns out to be the egg of a cave-dwelling reptilian deity? Yeah, that one. And Peter also tangles for a full issue with the Shocker, a punchline of a villain that is by far Spider-Man’s most common foe, but who is always dealt with so quickly in the introduction of a real storyline that I had failed to realize it was constantly the same guy until reading the giant glossary at the end of Ultimate X4. So it’s been nice to notice him in the past few volumes and be amused, and nicer still to see him get a full plot to himself for once.

I am getting more used to the new art, but Immomen is kind of terrible at drawing chick hair. (Mainly Mary Jane’s irritates me, but she is by no means the only victim.) Still and all, my main point is the one I opened with. I really am glad that I can see this book as only good. Because it’s nice to get a chance to relax from Bendis’ non-stop action over the last several books, it’s nice to think to myself that I’m capable of noticing when the quality is below outstanding, and it is correlatedly nice to be confident that my previous reviews have probably been accurate after all.

[1] Honestly, the differences are not that important, but it’s odd to me that they wouldn’t have worked a little harder to avoid glitches, since the reboot is still so very young in relative terms. Inexplicable presence of Colossus, no mention of Charles Xavier’s very public murder, etc.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I know the Ultimate Marvel universe has a sort of a time limit to it[1], I would be impressed by the new directions that have opened up as of the closing panels of the apparently appropriately named Apocalypse. The book closed up three separate Ultimate X-Men storylines in just five short issues. This has got to be some kind of record, I think.

First off, it closed down a Storm story that has thusfar been too anemic for me to mention, and in such an abrupt way that even if I had managed to care about it before, I would not now do so. (Thankfully, that was the bad part of the book; had the rest been even half as terrible, I would have had to work very hard to finish up.) After the lameness, though, the main event started, and it was a pretty decent main event, I must say. Remember a couple of books ago when that guy Cable came from a terrible future to stop it from ever happening? And so he hunted the streets of Los Angeles for Sarah Connor, until… okay, that’s not right at all. Anyway, he did what he did, and then over the next book, the differently-configured X-Men continued to work toward preventing that dark future. And now, finally, it all comes to a head! There are not so many revelations[2] as you might expect out of an eponymously apocalyptic event, but there are enough knock-down drag-out fights and casualties to make up for their lack. Plus, there’s also the conclusion of that third ongoing arc to deal with, which I will pretend not to explicitly reveal by saying only that it involves Jean Grey.

All of which goes back to what I was saying in the first place. If I did not know that there were only 1.5 books of Ultimate X-Men left, and then a giant question mark as to whether more will come afterwards, I would currently be very very excited by both the fact that so many old plotlines have been cleared away and especially by the manner in which it was done. It at least seems like there are really big things ahead for Marvel’s mutant populace.

[1] And, man, why is it consistently only the X-Men that make me think of this?
[2] haha