My recent history with Iron Man has been an odd one. The original run of comics has become truly terrible over the course of the early ’70s, the second movie was only serviceable, and the two previous solo comics in the Ultimate series were not to my taste. Despite that, I have consistently loved the character of Tony Stark in every format with which I am presented, and certainly he always works great in other, more collaborative works. Why can’t I find a consistently good solo run of Iron Man stories?[1]

Meanwhile, the Ultimate Comics brand has launched[2] in the same continuity as Marvel’s Ultimate series, only different I guess for publishing purposes? In any event, it’s right after the Ultimatum event, complete with destroyed New York City and a real dearth of living superheroes and -villains. This dearth does not include Tony Stark, who has escaped with his life and [in the collapsing economy, still] hundreds of millions of dollars. It does include the realization that his technology has slipped its bonds and there are suddenly people in advanced military suits all over the western world. And it’s Tony’s job (because it’s his responsibility? because of his pride? I guess the real question is whether those concerns are even extricable in his psyche) to get into Armor Wars with them to put at least this small corner of the brave new world aright.

The thing is… I mean, it was pretty good, right? But in all honesty, I think I liked it more because it was better than what I’ve been used to seeing than because it was an objective upgrade to the solo Iron Man oeuvre. At the very least, though, I’m glad this was Tony Stark in the full bloom of his ego instead of another chapter in his iffy origin story.

[1] I should note that I have faith in the badness of the current ’70s run being finite, and frankly also that I expect Iron Man 3 to be pretty great. Y’know, someday.
[2] Well, probably last year in real life, but the graphic novels have only launched over the past few months, which means I am approximately live on these books from here forward.

At long last, the weird forgotten story that languished for a few years in developmental hell even as the rest of the Ultimate universe was being tied up in a neat (by which I mean Gordian), tidy (by which I mean murderously violent) bow (by which I mean bow). After Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, which I would for my sanity place after Ultimates 2 ended and before any of the Ultimatum prequel-storylines, I will be explicitly in the “after we killed the Ultimate Universe and launched a new line of comics” territory, which is physically marked by my buying them in hardback graphic novel instead of paperback. Plus also, I’m almost completely caught up and will soon run out of new ones immediately available, which is a strange feeling all itself.

As for the story, well, the title kind of covers it. There are definite twists along the way, plus also pointers to Logan’s fate in the post-Ultimatum landscape, neither of which I have any interest in spoiling. I can say that series author Damon Lindelof, famous as an integral part of Lost’s creative team, is clearly the same guy you would expect to have written both things. He plays with the narrative structure pretty much from start to finish, calling it an effect of Wolverine’s constantly tampered-with memory even though we all know it’s an excuse to tell the story out of order for dramatic effect. I have no problem with that, and I guess I can see why he felt obligated, in a world he never made didn’t create, to come up with an excuse for why it was happening, but mostly what I think instead is, come on dude, we know you did this only because you think it’s awesome, so why pretend there’s a valid in-story reason?

Anyway, though, Hulk and Wolverine? They totally versus each other, way more than that time when Iron Man was supposed to but it turned out pretty much entirely otherwise. Truth-in-advertising for the win!

If you are anything like me, you are wondering: why did you read so many Marvel Ultimate comics in a row just now? Way more than usual, and also you were kind of pissed, right? Well, the thing is, despite my distaste for the handling, I really had no choice but to see how things worked out for Spider-Man after reading that issue, so finishing up was my only valid option. And here we are.

Ultimatum: Requiem does about what a student of Latin would expect. That is, it sings a song for the dead. At least, that is kind of what it does. Although there are obituaries galore, at least one very moving and many of the rest little more than thinly veiled character histories, the bigger theme tying the three authors and stories together is aftermath. What will New York City be like with its self-appointed guardian Spider-Man presumed dead in the wreckage? Can the Fantastic Four survive the losses they have taken, to their families, to their mutual trust, to their innocence? Will the mutant community survive the knowledge that one of their own became, in one day, the most successful mass murderer in history? What could have been (and okay, in the case of the X-Men, was; you can’t win ’em all) not much more than an excuse to tie off loose ends before the brand changes to Ultimate Comics and new stories begin was instead a chance to acknowledge the wounds experienced by a whole world and put them in a human context. Superhero comics are always about wish fulfillment to some degree or other, but sometimes, they are more. Despite a deeply flawed execution of a tenuous premise, I figure a couple of authors were able to eke that out of even this situation.

(And I’m not just saying that because Joe Pokaski proved me wrong by in fact explaining to some degree what had happened to the Human Torch after all. I mean, it still wasn’t all that interesting, but at least he gets one of the two aftermath wins to make up for it.)

So, Ultimatum, right? I’ve been talking about this for maybe longer in real time than Marvel did when they were gearing up for it in the first place. Due to some extremely poorly hidden spoilers that even show up in the titles of graphic novel collections, Magneto is finally sufficiently pissed off at humanity to do something about us once and for all, the major upshot of which is that Manhattan is devastated by an enormous tidal wave, in exactly the style you have seen so many times before. And then, shit goes down.

And the thing is, that sounds pretty okay to me as a premise. The whole world is affected, sure, but New York gets the lion’s share of focus, just as Marvel has always done. But then they screwed up my experience by dividing the story between the Ultimatum issues and the issues of the various series they had in progress at the time. Still, I think I could have been okay with that too, except that the actual event issues, even after I disregard the poor ordering, were… tawdry. Largely, they were a series of strung-together faux-shocking events, one after another, designed for maximum impact predicated upon minimum thought. And even that I could forgive, except that solid chunks of the events have no explanation at all. What really happened to the Human Torch? Did I miss something regarding Quicksilver’s fate, or was it presented as a fait accompli with no prior reference? Does Namor actually have any relevance to anything in the entire Ultimate universe? And since I’ve actually read the entire sequence now, it’s not like I can pretend to myself that these questions were answered or even acknowledged as valid.[1]

Essentially, there were a handful of characters that had a story arc in the Ultimatum event, and everyone else was only present to be trimmed down or because we knew they’d be supposed to be present during a global terrorist event. For the record, Wolverine, Magneto, Spider-Man, and J. Jonah Jameson actually had interesting stories to be told. Oh, and, to my very great surprise, Henry Pym. Iron Man and the Thing did okay. And that’s really all. For the climactic event of a ten year series, that is not nearly enough.

[1] I lie, as I have not completed Requiem yet. But I know I’m right. And even if I’m wrong, making stuff up and explaining it a few months later? Unsatisfying!

Okay, just to get it out of the way: the Ultimatum storyline is poorly collected across three or four books. (I am hoping across only three, and that the epilogue book will at least have continuity[1] again.) I have read each of the three books in question, so I can say this with authority now, not merely the speculation that marked my last review. As a result, even Spider-Man’s take on the Ultimatum event is kind of disjointed. But here’s what I liked about it. While the other authors were stumbling past each other trying to figure out who could tell which part of whose story and in what order, Bendis got past the actual event as quickly as possible so that he could tell a smaller, more personal story about the immediate aftermath, and not incidentally about the nature of heroism.

The final issue of Spider-Man’s Ultimate run, #133, had the fewest words I think I’ve ever seen in a single comic issue. It may also have been the most affecting I’ve seen. And just to repeat myself, this in the midst of what has otherwise been a useless mishmash of tangled and rarely more than half-complete storylines. But, y’know, I should save a little vitriol for the next review, since this one deserves basically none whatever.

[1] The literary kind, not the years-or-decades-of-plot kind.

Even though there’s still one book left that predates the events about which I am now reading, it has yet to be released in trade paperback size to match all the rest of what I have, so apparently I’ll have to actually find out what’s up with this whole Ultimatum thing, now. Except, technically not quite yet, because despite the branding, March on Ultimatum is really just a handful of new annuals featuring mostly the usual suspects doing mostly the usual things. Still, there is a little big of a finger waggle pointing out that this whole Ultimatum thing is just over the horizon now, which since I’ve known that for months of my time as I’ve been reading along means it must have been excruciating waiting on these titles to release a month at a time, and all of them going on about the inevitable doom for a year or so.

The first pair of stories is the most relevant: the X-Men travel back in time[1] to prevent Reed Richards from doing something that has ruined[2] their future. Although this honestly doesn’t seem to have much to do with the Ultimatum, they at least mention it as an inevitable event in the near future from which these other problems sprang forth. But it’s okay, because I enjoyed the story on its own merits as well as for the characterizations of Ben Grimm and future-Sue Storm. Then there’s a Black Panther story which seems to exist only to retcon my racial concerns from The Ultimates 3. It I suppose accomplishes that, but at the expense of taking a pretty cool character and rendering him meaningless in the Ultimate universe, at which point, how about just not using him instead? Also, there’s a Hulk story that for some reason includes one of the Squadron Supreme character from Ultimate Power and (for that matter) that for some reason includes the Hulk; the less said about it, the better. (I exaggerate, in that it was mildly amusing. But mainly it was spectacularly unnecessary.)

The best of the bunch[3] was the Spider-Man story, which had no apparent tie to anything else at all and was just another large-sized Spider-Man story. It’s just, as usual, Bendis shows a world full of meaningful progress and understandable consequences while everyone around him is scrabbling wildly for plotlines from miserable futures or annoying side-dimensions or the drips and drabs of 45 years of bloated Marvel continuity. For example, the police? They have noticed that Spider-Man usually accomplishes things and are glad of his help. Will that ever happen in mainstream Marvel continuity? Not as of issue 91, I can state with great current authority. (And, okay, this third annual postdates a higher issue number in Bendis’ run, so I’m not being perfectly fair here. But I still don’t expect anything to suddenly change.) Bost mostly it’s a relationship story punctuated by the arrival of Mysterio[4], who plays such a small (and unresolved!) role that I fully expect him to matter quite a bit in the next full Spider-Man graphic novel, predictably named Ultimatum.

[1] Is it just me, or are future timelines just littered with X-Men possessing time machines? Time travel is never a mutant power, and one dark future is never described the same way as the next. Nevertheless, back they keep coming. Persecution complex, much?
[2] And while I’m on the topic of things that are just me: is it, or does Reed Richards destroy every alternate universe / dimension / timeline he gets his grubby paws on? That guy is just a colossal dick. (Though the younger Ultimate version is at least endearing about his galactic failures.)
[3] Prepare to feign shock in 5… 4… 3…
[4] In mainstream continuity, he’s a special effects wizard turned supervillain; here, it is way too soon to tell who he might be or what he wants. But I expect him to not be a mere villain retread, not this late in the game.

The most recent (and in a way, the final?) Ultimate Spider-Man book is based on a video game. That could be a death sentence in a lot of hands, but Brian Michael Bendis has, through years of solid effort, earned my trust. More troublingly, though, it’s based on a video game that came out in 2006, which by even the least generous of publishing schedules means that its events would be months or years out of real-time date from when these scripts were being adapted. So it was kind of strange to see, at a time when every other comic in the Ultimate universe was getting ready for the big Ultimatum conclusion to everything, the Spider-Man story jump back in time by a month or two for a pretty meaningful story-insertion (or, if you feel bitter about it, a big retcon).

War of the Symbiotes tells of what has been happening with Eddie Brock, trapped inside the Venom suit, or possibly it trapped inside him.[1] The problem of course is that I wasn’t all that interested in Venom the last time I saw him, and he’s only gotten iffier since. But in my experience thusfar, a mediocre Bendis Spider-Man story still makes for a pretty good ride on average, and certainly this one got better as it went along. The end result (courtesy of an additional, unrelated retcon) is a pretty big deal, like I said. I cannot decide if I approve or not; it depends on how it gets used down the line. But I have a feeling I’m not going to find out until after the whole big Ultimatum thing, which I am beginning to realize I will have a hard time taking with perfect seriousness; it’s been looming over my knowledge of the series for entirely too long. But I guess we’ll see!

[1] Even in video games, Bendis is pretty good about providing that minimal amount of depth / uncertainty, about just who the parasite is supposed to be.

I’m torn on this book, unlike the rest of the internet. (They seem to despise it, and I think it is only fair to calibrate expectations in that way.) But first things first: Who Killed the Scarlet Witch? is simultaneously the straight-forward murder mystery that its title implies and also a means of setting the stage for the upcoming Ultimatum that, so far as I know, I am only two books away from. I can’t think of a good way to add more to my plot summary that wouldn’t be extensively spoilerish, so I’ll move on to the controversy.

On the one hand, I really did enjoy the actual storyline. Both the pacing of the mystery’s unraveling and its ultimate denouement were satisfactory to me. And honestly I think even that, my enjoyment thusfar of the build toward this crossover event thingy they’ve decided they had to do, is a bit controversial. But so be it, some days I am an easy audience. Still, there’s that other hand, wherein a lot of the details went wrong. Like, wasn’t Juggernaut dead the last time I saw him? And was it absolutely necessary to drop in a Ka-Zar[1] cameo this many years into the Ultimate run, and this close to its end? And, seriously, the use of the Black Panther seemed racially insensitive at best. And none of those missteps was necessary to create the plot that I was happy with! So frustrating.

[1] He’s a Tarzan rip-off from the mid ’60s. Not bad as characters go, just untimely.

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.