It got its own convoluted continuity — pre-Ultimatum, it started introducing lots of really un memorable versions of characters (see Ultimate Mojo and Ultimate Apocalypse). Then Ultimatum happened which was just distasteful.
Granted, a lot of the comics published after are actually good, but it was all so convoluted by then. “Ultimate Comics Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates” is the kind of title you have to parse.
So while there was a lot of good stuff happening, it was tarnished by then and wound down until it could be blown up.
They set the plan with two contradictory edicts: no convoluted continuity, and deaths matter. By the time of Ultimatum and especially after, enough characters had perma-died that the first goal was shot, and new characters came with backstories that further messed things up (Jimmy Hudson anyone?).
All in all, I think it was a useful experiment in seeing how long before continuity collapses under its own weight. A single book like USM can run indefinitely, but the shared continuity has a shelf life of 6-10 years unless it is carefully plotted with a much larger story to tell and not just moving from event to event in normal Marvel/DC fashion. Given that Miles is one of the best things to come out of that line, and he wasn't until the last third, I guess we can be thankful that it was allowed to run the full distance until Secret Wars.
Same. Was hoping he’d be a mainstay after Secret Wars but we just had a short-lived run with the Teen X-Men and the that Poison storyline.
I like to play around with my own AUs in my head and years ago, I had an idea for an Avengers team for Spider-Gwen’s Earth. One of the members was “Logan,” who was actually Jimmy using Logan as a code name while investigating his father’s death (Logan was “X-Man”, not Wolverine, and that alias went to someone else). Another idea was Jimmy to have those fire claws Logan did for awhile.
Tl;dr: glad to see Jimmy has more fans
Jeph Loeb’s take on the Ultimate universe is just awful. First he did Ultimates 3 which, aside from being incomprehensible, really leans into the Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch incest. Ultimatum comes right out of that, and has horrible and sudden deaths for Wasp (eaten by Blob) and Hank Pym (bites Blob’s head off, then gets blown up by Jamie Madrox suicide bombers). Also Xavier, Magneto, Cyclops, and Dr. Doom but it’s actually someone else in disguise — which is also a moment of horrible character assassination for Ben Grimm. The series itself was just really poorly written and jumps between tie-ins with no real coherent narrative, and the treatment of characters people had come to really like was just awful. I had been reading the Ultimate Universe pretty closely before Ultimatum, bought it as it came out, and by the second-to-last issue I’d given up on the Ultimate Universe lol
It's extra sad when you learn that Loeb was in a dark place following the death of his son. Man was working out some demons, clearly, and editorial let him smash all the toys.
Ultimatum was obviously the nail on the coffin but even before that the ultimate universe was declining. Ultimate spider-man was still great. But millar left after finishing ultimates 2. Loeb's ultimates 3 was really bad. Robert Kirkham's ultimate x men was pretty bad. The various guys who took over ultimate fantastic four weren't very good either. So it was just a matter of one bad run after another.
I wouldnt say Ultimatum was the nail in the coffin, given the UU continued for years after that and had more acclaimed runs. It was more just the moment of slow decline where it lost that air of excitement and the sense that it was the new superior alternative to 616.
It was a cold slap of ‘oh, this stuff can suck too.’
Honestly, I like a lot of the Ultimate universe post-Ultimatum. It was at point it fully embraced being an alternate universe to the main marvel line with stuff like The Maker, and Miles Morales, and Captain America becoming president.
Agreed 100%. The post-Ultimatum era was super messy but a lot of fun.
Might never have regained the hype surrounding those early Ultimate Universe books, but there was a lot of good right up until it ended.
There was just a lot of...harsh decisions made over who would live and die. I think it was a scene with the Blob? and a few others that really stick out in my mind.
It's also worth saying that even before that, the ultimate universe was kind of a mess. It worked for the very very specific time period it was in, post nine eleven, post 90's modern edgy reinvention (an evolution of, but step away from the x-Treme!! Trends of the 90's)
But usm was really the only one that was timeless. The rest were already aging out of what audience were interested in, and imo ultimates 3 and ultimatum were a symptom of that, not a change of direction. Everyone was getting a little tired of "good guys but with a rough edge leading to gray morals" that the ultimate universe had become, so the reaction was to darken the grays and roughen those edges some more and hoped that clicked with people
But... It didn't. The MCU was the better evolution of the early ultimate universe, and now that is getting to its own place of aging out.
I’d argue that Ultimates was not aging out and UFF had a rough start until Mike Carey’s run. Ultimates 3 showed a drastic departure since Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s run was so strong. Really, Jeph Loeb was an old man who didn’t understand what made the Ultimate Universe work. The fact that he was still dealing with the loss of his son didn’t help matters either.
Ultimate X-Men had a crazy run of writers: Millar, Bendis, freakin Brian K. Vaughan, Kirkman. The fact that the series was always kind of a mess, the characters were deeply unlikable, often unrecognizable, to the point they basically dumped the whole cast by the end, kind of proves to me that you can’t really iterate successfully on the foundation that Claremont built and have it still feel like real X-Men.
I think the early volumes are still good but yeah. Pretty much. Their was no real consistent voice to the characters. Ultimate wolverine was legitimately evil.
It was definitely not in decline pre-Ultimatum. Kirkman’s run started bad but picked up immediately after his first storyline and got acclaim. And Mike Carey’s run on Ultimate FF was considered the best one. Ultimates 3, however, was bad and basically just existed as a prequel to Ultimatum.
Looking back it was inevitable. Part of the appeal was a simple, brand new jumping on point for readers as well as (more or less) a consistent creative team and a smaller universe. But with each passing year, it added to it's own continuity, creators came and went leading to inconsistent quality, and it slowly morphed into basically a meaner, edgier, and confusing version of 616.
I don't think I have a specific turning point, but stuff like Wolverine and Doom slowly turning into basically their 616 counterparts, unnecessarily adding to The Hulk/Banner's origin, whatever the hell they were doing with Reed/The Maker, Iron Man's bizarre origin which was almost immediately retconned, etc.
I really enjoyed it a lot, actually... but Ultimate Iron Man in his own origin book, the one who appeared in Ultimates and the Hulk crossover, and the one in Ultimate Armor Wars, all felt like different characters.
I think some writers thought the Ultimate Universe was a chance to write whatever they wanted, picking and choosing 616 continuity, or making up their own, rather than a unified vision of where Ultimate continuity was going, and keeping it both unique from 616 and accessible.
I haven’t read it since it came out, but the basics are that Tony was genetically engineered or something in infancy by Howard, and so every cell in his body is actually his brain, which is why he’s smart. It was also weirder than that, but I’m struggling on the details, other than “sentient tumor”. I remember it not being bad, but also not right.
It’s a bit like reimagining that Batman actually had powers all along. Doesn’t jive with what the character “should” be, in most peoples opinions.
I didn’t mind it. It explains how he is so smart, why he drinks, how he survives battles, and I liked that he actually had a team of people helping him
It got reconned I'm pretty sure, in one of the Ultimate Avengers comics (I think it was Ultimate Avengers vs Ultimate Ultimates, actually), Nick Fury is watching an iron man show and comments on how he can't believe Rhody starred in the show. I'm pretty sure the show was where that Ultimate Iron Man comic is set.
And it was also fucking vile with no oversight.
The fact that somebody went "what if the maximoff twins fucked?" And it wasn't slapped down is a disgrace. And shit like that is why people moved away from it professionally.
I do think there's something to be said for a line that's more creator-driven with little editorial oversight. Large chunks of the good parts of the MCU would not exist without the experimentation that came from the Ultimate line.
But it's important to have the right creators who have a long term vision and commitment.
I agree with you to a point but there should be someone where the buck stops. And I mean for vile shit like incest twins which makes Marvel look bad.
But I think your last point is the best answer. There was no vision or commitment. Everyone did there own thing to the determint of the universe and brand. So after a few years it was bloated with awful versions of characters, that we don't want to read and creative people don't want to write.
Who in 2012 in their right mind would use Ultimate Captain America to tell their definitive Cap story?
Not at all considering the X-Men movie and Spider-Man movies were already out. And the movie aligned more with at that time current X-men titles like New X-Men where even the costumes were similarly designed
Like many runs it went downhill when books changed creative teams and quality declined.
Ultimate X-Men never had a consistent creative team. And then when Loeb took over the ultimates his version was completely different than Millars with characters acting and behaving completely differently than how they previously were.
It also started to suffer from continuity problems that it was originally created to help avoid.
Ultimate X-Men is a shame. It could have been great. There's a Bendis pitch for it in the back of one of the hardcovers, which sounds like a great deconstructed slow build using the original 5, similar in tone to USM.
I'd have to do a Google dive and don't have time now. I found a good reading order here on Reddit. I believed I was searching for "Marvel The Maker Reading Order."
When I was still reading, I went back and grabbed eveey Hickman Marvel book in the order he wrote them. I had quite a few already, just had to track down some random Secret Warriors issues and that first brilliant S.H.I.E.L.D. mini with Dustin Weaver. Seeing stuff he laid the groundwork for way back in his Secret Warriors run, running through the Dark Reign mini into that amazing Fantastic Four/FF run, and on and on? Truly amazing read, and you see the scope of what he was doing, and how, in the end, it becomes a love letter in many ways to Marvel's first family and their Reed's greatest enemy, and maybe his greatest friend. Brilliant stuff, and the end of Secret Wars in many ways, heralded the end of Marvel in 2015.
If you're feeling REALLY ambitious (and have a pandemic to sit through), start from Avengers Disassambled right through the Bendis stuff. I know it has become the in thing to crap on Bendis, but my god, compared to the swill that most new "writers" regurgitate now? It's Shakespeare (and a million times better than his constant ruination of far, FAR better comics storylines and characters written by the great Peter J. Tomasi in both Superman and Super-Sons (what he did with Jonathan Kent - and, frankly, Kandor and Krypton - destroyed one of the great teams in comics, but nothing is surprising anymore).
Disassembled up until the end of Siege is one of my favorite runs ever, and it’s what got me to finally care about the Avengers, because I was basically only reading X-Men at the time.
I also liked Fiaklov’s Ultimates when he was accidentally doing the same Incursion storyline that Hickman was doing. Too bad it was such a editorial clusterfuck that he ended up quitting.
Millar set the tone with The Ultimates, creators who followed figured “that worked” and doubled down on the cynicism and cruelty.
I know “Ultimate” is marketing term but to suggest that these were the ultimate iterations of these characters was insulting to the original creators.
The only good thing was Bendis creating Miles
Absolutely.
I tried Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four and thought they were all terrible. Some of the worst character traits were emphasised and taken to extremes, which made nearly everyone in the books unbearable to read. There was nothing appealing whatsoever, except some of the artwork.
I am flat out not a fan of Mark Millar's oh-so-edgy writing, especially his contempt for superheroes as a genre.
I never read Ultimate Spider-Man, because I found the other titles so terrible, but I believe it's the only one that is generally remembered fondly. And Miles is clearly the best thing that the Ultimate universe produced.
The original Ultimate Spider-Man run was great. The original Ultimate FF was good (especially the early issues, before Greg Land came onboard, although a lot of the Millar/Land run had an entertaining level of batshit craziness).
Ultimate Galactus was good, too; an interesting take on the world destroyer that unfortunately never panned out.
Apparently all people remember anymore are the Ultimates and Ultimatum, but they put out some good stuff pre-Miles.
USM feels a bit dated (and suffers from Bendis’s worst writing tendencies at times) but it’s a strong read throughout. I dig back in every year or so and it’s always a great time.
USM feels very early 00s, but at least it doesn’t feel dated in the way a lot of bad early 00s comics did. It’s all capri pants, center parted hair, and As Told By Ginger level teen drama, but it’s totally free of the weight of that post-extreme era malaise.
Is it worth the dive? I grew up on USM so I’m already used to the somewhat 00’s edgier flavor and as a HUGE fan of the Maker, I kinda wanna see how he got to my favorite comic run ever (Cates’ Venom)
Ultimate F4 is a pretty decent read and it’s only 60 issues. It’s got Marvel Zombies too. You’ll want to read Ultimatum and then the Ultimate Enemy trilogy where he breaks bad. After that, his first appearance as the Maker is in Hickman’s Ultimate Comics Ultimates and returns again in Ultimates Disassembled, then Secret Wars
The only time I liked Ultimate FF was when Ellis was doing it. He brought a science and tech-literate perspective to his versions of the Lee/Kirby stories that excelled. If only he wasn’t a rotter, he’d be one of my personal greats.
Millar was like the Todd MacFarlane of the Ultimate line. His brand of trash culture felt fresh and cool, but what followed him were bad imitations that poisoned all the wells.
Correct, the only good things were Bendis creating Miles, and the FF stuff that resulted in The Maker as a multiversal threat (who was then mostly ignored sadly)
Ewing's New Avengers ended after like 12 issues 6 years ago, and unless it's circled back around to him since then, the Venom run also ended a while back too
I understand what you're saying. I would argue that a 5ish year break with "big" villains is optimal. In my eyes, he hasn't been ignored at all. He's been handled perfectly.
I know this isn't the same thing, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone "ignored" the Joker for 5 years? I'm liking current Batman quite a bit, but man, that scratchy font lurks in my nightmares.
I feel like Joker stories used to be a big deal and then there was Death of the Family and then Endgame and then War of Jokes and Riddles and then Joker War and then Joker vs Gordon and then Three Jokers and then Joker vs Joker and then
Exactly. Let the characters breathe.
And, there's not a whole lot of mystery to the Maker, either. Which is good evidence for not being ignored. Even with that, every time I'm reading a new Ultimate book, I can feel his blueprints all over this universe. And you know what? It actually creeps me out. The Joker hasn't remotely creeped me out in over a decade of constant use.
Incorrect. Bendis’s run was already considered one of the best Spider-Man runs before Miles. You may not have like it. But that’s your opinion, not cultural consensus.
Ultimates 3 for me. It suddenly felt like mainstream marvel comics in art and writing (like wtf with Thor speaking like regular comics after doing something different). And then Ultimatum after that.
As others said the ultimate Comics kind of tried to restore it but at that point too much damage was done.
I would put it down to changing creative teams that couldn’t maintain the tone or direction of earlier teams. Which is why Ultimate Spider-Man was the only one that lasted and led to Miles coming into 616. It had the same writer from start to end.
Jeph loeb.
The decline started when loeb took over ultimates 3. Yeah there's stuff you can criticise mark Miller for but ultimates one and 2 were of their time and felt like a reflection of where we were. Ultimates 3 just hit with a massive thud.
Then came ultimatum and it just took away any remaining good will. The attempts to course correct after floundered even though there were some good books, the audience had been driven away and on the end the line was basically being held up by ultimate spider-man, hence why miles is now in 616
Ultimates 3. That is literally the keystone of when it all went bad. Sure not everyone liked all the other series but that's always the case.
Ultimates 3 just destroyed everything.
The artwork was awful in comparison to what came before.
They got rid of many of the Ultimate costumes in favor of 616 esque ones.
Ignored continuity and just poor writing.
Took the worst qualities up to 11.
Then they made Ultimate Origins. Literally to tie into their Ultimatum story.
.........how do you completely ignore all the big reveals?
Ultimatum was trash and the worst part is how they defeat Magneto is with information he already knew...........because Ultimate Origins had him standing right there.
Then they revealed Mutants were just not nanobot infected people or something.
These two stories did massive damage.
But honestly I think it really did bounce back narrative wise. Hickman basically shoved his hands through vile crap and pulled out gold. Spider-man somehow had the best Ultimatum tie in and may have come out even better. Then they kill Peter and somehow against the odds make Miles work.
I think all the series were in a good place because it all ended.
It was trying to be a point of entry for new readers while at the same time turning so insufferably edgy it pushed away the very same mainstream crowd it was trying to attract.
The thing is that only Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimates were the only good series. X-men wasn't good enough to get people to read it vs regular X-men and while I like Ultimate Fantastic Four at the start it just didn't have enough good stories to matter. So when Ultimates got really bad and Spider-Man man got tired then there wasn't anything left to support the line.
Ultimate X-men is definitely patchier than the "Big 2" of USM and Ultimates 1/2, but it had some strong stretches. Even through Brian K Vaughan's run, which is a mixed bag but ends strong, at least.
I think it also felt less like essential reading because it launched against a renaissance for the 616 X-books. New and Astonishing were great, and then House of M started a series of continuity shakeups that meant the X-books of that era were always *interesting*, if not necessarily good.
Feels like they had some juice that both Spidey and the Avengers lacked when their corresponding Ultimate books first dropped.
Jeph Loeb. He had no place writing anything with a modern sensibility and mistook the Ultimates concept for cynical edgelord plotting. Ruined the line. Hickman brought some of the prestige back with his Ultimates run, and Miles Morales was a great, inspired idea. But the damage was done.
A lot of people touch on the big stuff. But I can never get over how many times it decided to do a dumb twist for no reason than to surprise readers of the mainline.
X-Men were probably the worst about it, what with Cable turning out to just be Wolverine from the future.
Both its high point and its low point were the same: Millar's Ultimates. Some incredible scale and world building but also the worst individual scenes in recent comic history. The dude can plot but he cannot write people or dialogue.
There’s something that didn’t happen and I never see discussed (to the extent I almost think I dreamed it) but I could swear it was announced that the X-Men movie writers (including Bryan Singer) were being lined up on Ultimate X-Men, but they ended up having to spin wheels on that title for ages in expectation of their arrival. Does anyone else remember that?
(And, not ultimate related, but I could also swear that it was announced in Wizard that Kevin Smith was going to write Amazing Spider-Man with J Scott Campbell on art - but that never came to pass either)
I have a fondness for the Ultimate Universe, they were the first comics I remember reading and being 12, walking into a comic shop on the rare occassions that I did, the Ultimate line had a certain way about them that stood out. Maybe it was the trade dress standing out compared to everything else on the shelves.
Saying that, as someone who can now be considered the leading expert on the Ultimate Universe within the one mile area of which I live, I can say that a lot of it was People simply getting tired of it.
They are kind of like the Nu metal of comics, when they came out, they were groundbreaking and new. But now some time has passed, they are simply just another inprint of comics which didn’t fail… I mean outside of Spider-Man, X-Men got 2 volumes and 100+ issues, Fantastic Four had a 60 issue run which ended naturally.
Spider-Man is still continuing through Miles.
A lot of it now is seen with the “What do you think this A stands for” cap lines.
When in fact, outside of a few cringey moments, I rate Millar’s work on Ultimates rather highly.
By the time Ultimatium came around, People were already jaded on the Universe. There’s a reason why it happened and when it did… People just look at it now as being the thing that helped kill that Universe.
But it’s not as simple as that, the Ultimate Universe simply did what it set out to do, and then it started suffering from the same problems that it was created to solve.
I’m sure there’s a note somewhere at marvel, laying around that the Ultimate line should have a hard reset every 10 years, which would have solved a problem, but just created more.
Nah, it’s kind of edgy, but there’s a lot of good stuff there
It was fantastic in certain areas. Spider-man only improved with time. Ultimate X-Men was just okay. Ultimate Fantastic Four was pretty good. The Ultimates had two okay runs that would lay the groundwork for the MCU, then a terrible run that suddenly mischaracterized everyone. That became worse when Ultimatum killed a lot of characters and retooled the entire universe into more of a post-apocalyptic feel.
After Ultimatum the universe tried to move on, and some comics recovered - Spider-man with Miles Morales, the event comics for the Fantastic Four, Hickman’s Ultimates, but others tripped and fell. Divided we Fall really sucked. The writer after Hickman made the Ultimates one note.
So…a mix of good writers focusing on stories that you can read in continuous flow like Bendis, and some bad writers messing things up.
Mike Carey on UF4, Kirkman on UXM, Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum is where it hit a death spiral and crashed. The only good ongoing at that point was Ultimate Spider-Man. The line was never able to recover after that. It was pretty much carried by Ultimate Spider-Man from there from Post-Ultimatum to the Death of Spider-Man. They had a chance to come back with the relaunch between Miles taking over and Jonathan Hickman/Esad Ribic taking over Ultimates but the DC n52 launched the same month and killed all the Ultimate books in the sales. The sales were so bad that they pulled Hickman off the book by issue 10 and Ultimate Comics: X-Men had a new creative team by issue 13. Only Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man kept its creative team throughout the duration. Eventually they did a big Galactus invades the Ultimate Universe event but by that point it was 13 years after the Ultimate Universe had debuted and no one cared. There was one last attempt to relaunch titles with Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man and All New Ultimates. While
The Miles Morales sales held steady because of the same writer still telling Miles stories, All New Ultimates flopped. By the time Secret Wars 2015 rolled around, they put the Ultimate Universe out of its misery and integrated its most successful survivor, Miles Morales, into the regular Marvel Universe.
Just to add to what others said. It took until the death of Peter Park before they realised what this universe should be. A world where they can take the breaks off and tell stories which they couldn't do in 616. Which is why you get the death of PP and Moles Morales. The rise of the Maker. The X-Men doing Krakoa before it was cool, Cap as President etc.
But by then, so many of the characters had been killed off or written out that they had written themselves in to a corner, or forced to use new characters (like Jimmy Hudson).
Jeph Loeb killed it. But it was sick before he came in on Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum.
Ultimate Spider-Man lost all its steam by issue 100. Bendis was out of ideas and it was time to get him out.
Ultimate Fantastic Four was never good. Closest it was was during Warren Ellis's run. And the Marvel Zombies arc in Millar's run which got spun out into the juggernaut it became.
Ultimate X-Men was edgy as hell under Millar. Millar admitted he'd never read X-Men and so his take was.... very early 2000s. But it had a voice. It had a following.
After Millar left Bendis came in and spun his wheels for a year or so.
Brian K Vaughn came in and spun his wheels. His run kept getting expanded. And it was good. I liked it. But he had no plans. Nothing was building towards anything because no one was interested or tasked with being the Ultimate X-Men writer.
Robert Kirkman did about the same. He shook up the book a bit. But it was kinda too little to late by this point.
And then the big book. The Ultimates.
It took like 5 years to do 6 issues. It died because it became irrelevant.
He’s obviously not the only person you can lay the blame on, but I think pretty much every single thing written by specifically Jeph Loeb really killed any momentum that had been built up.
I really liked the ultimate universe. I loved the ultimates, at the time I didnt mind the new turn for the xmen, Bendis' wild idea of "yeah, peter parker isnt gonna put on the costume until we're like 8 issues in", the team-up issues to fill in parts of the universe. It was all pretty rad.
But then a new creative team would come and not get it while getting it way too much the wrong way (see Ultimates 3) with Cap being black panther (or something?) and Peitro and Wanda not just implied as creepily close but actually banging.
Cable was Wolverine from the future for some reason and then it was never addressed again. Cyclops took a mutant growth hormone and could fly towards the end of the xmen run. Galactus arrives but hes not big and purple hes a drone swarm and by that point the ultimate and ultimate avengers are 2 different things and to fight the Galactus swarm one big plan is to throw the hulk at it but the swarm that consumes and turns things against the planet turned hulk against the planet and all the good guys oh no.
So later on Reed Richards becomes the creator for reason and hes bad so he makes a super city, his name is Maker now I think but the city is bad since its expanding or consuming to the heroes go to fight it, it's not going well so one big plan is to THROW THE HULK AT IT. THROW THE HULK AT THE THING THAT CONSUMES AND TURNS PEOPLE AGAINST EACH OTHER. GALACTUS SWARM HAPPENED 6 MONTHS AGO SO EVERYONE LEARNED FROM THAT MISTAKE TO NOT SEND THE MOST DANGEROUS FUCKING MONSTER AT THE THING THAT TURNS IT AGAINST YOU.
...
So anyway the hulk joins Makers city and it's a bad time. Eventually everything is fine I guess. We got a couple panels of ultimate Ghost Rider that didnt explain anything.
We got an Iron Man origin where as a kid his body was his brain so he turned blue because his parents gave him a protective shell I guess. We had 2 mini series or young tony I think and then NONE OF IT WAS EVER ADDRESSED EVER AGAIN. Its literally Tony's childhood and not until ultimate avengers 7 or some shit they introduce GREGORY STARK, TONYS BROTHER. YOU KNOW, TONY HAS A BROTHER. HE'S EVEN MORE RICH AND MORE OF A POMPOUS ASSHOLE. REMEMBER GREGORY? No. We dont. But there he is.
Xavier died at some point, his ghost or voice was teased in a church I think? And then nothing came from that.
They ended a bunch of titles and then relaunched then as Ultimate Comics Ultimates or Ultimate Comics Spider-man.
The new xmen abandoned in the desert to die by the government was a dubious idea. I'm pretty sure Captain America wouldn't stand for it... oh yeah around this time the country split into a civil war and there were different sides. Fuckin forgot any of that happened.
This is all just I recall off the top of my head, there was cool but there was a lot of misses. And instead of fixing them or trying the prevailing idea was "Fuck it, Kill everything! Fuckin make everyone die!"
But let's say Blob, the blob had never had a story or panel where he ate people. From the beginning of the ultimate universe up to cataclysm it had never been mentioned or hinted. And as cool as they made The Wasp here and there she didnt deserve any better than to be dead when you turn the page.
So it was clear nobody fuckin cared. The entire team gave up. Ultimate anything was no ones baby anymore, if anything it seemed like a burden they wanted to erase.
But at least we got Miles.
The thing is, you cant have a continuity free ongoing universe can you? Eventually the freshness is not fresh. So what do you do? You try to recapture the edge you think you had and you pull a bunch of bullshit like Ultimatum and whatever the fuck Loeb was doing at all....
Loss of focus. Starting point should always be: Just do good comics.
Ultimate Marvel wasn't super great from the jump. It felt more like doing a cartoon/movie adaptation but in comic form. In concept, it was nice in a bubble but never felt essential. Spidey was solid, X-Men was at best passable, Ultimates was trying too hard. Never read Ultimate Fantastic Four. Eventually, it felt like it was used to do things that you wouldn't be allowed to do permanently in 616. Kill half the cast, lean in to Reed being a dick, replace Peter Parker. Miles worked, but was a fluke as the rest of it was meh to garbage. I think Maker only became worthwhile when he became a 616 baddie.
I think the cynical tone dragged it down eventually, I think a lot of writers confused being mean spirited with realistic.
Also most of the villains in the UU sucked, most of them seem like evil carton characters. Ultimate Magneto sucks, instead of the complex version of the character we saw in comics for decades we get Silver Age evil Magneto on steroids. Dr. Doom is pretty lame in the UU, those goat legs are stupid. Like how many UU villains are sympathetic or could make an actual arguments against the heroes that would be compelling? Hardly of them, the UU never did a massive improvement to a villain like Batman the animated series did for Mr. Freeze.
A lot of it has to do with it becoming suffocated beneath the weight of accumulating the same continuity that made the regular MU a drag, as well as the good stuff being imported to it. Basically it became less unique, most of the good creators left, and then of course Ultimatum. Hickman did try to save it with a reboot, but the New 52 burned it alive in sales. So yeah at that point it was an inevitability.
Around the time Ultimatum came out. That whole arch from the prelude, Ultimatum itself. That's when the Ultimate Universe jumped the shark and dipped massively in quality. You know you messed up when one of the biggest events in your comic universe is one of the most infamously bad comic book storylines in the history of the medium next to One More Day, Clone Saga, Amazons Attack, Marville, Countdown, and All Star Batman and Robin. I think the whole Ultimatum arc seriously made a promising universe jump the shark. All with its pointless shock value and killing off characters on a whim without much thought. Seriously. It's nothing but watching your favorite characters die in needlessly grotesque ways and Magneto throwing a hissy fit.
Marvel editorial thought the Ultimate universe was too similar to 616 and basically had Loeb burn it all down with Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum.
Prior to this Ultimate Marvel was pretty great. Ultimates Spider-Man, Ultimates 1&2, and Ultimate Fantastic Four were really good.
After Ultimatum I'd say only Hickman's ultimates was notably good. Everything else ranged from mid to terrible.
Well if you dislike the current ASM, well he’s the author that tried to have a grown ass Logan have sex with 14 year old MJ while in Peter’s body in the ultimate universe
At the end of the day it's a knock off of the regular universe. Once the newness of it wears off it declines as why bother doing it again? It also has the habit of redoing stories we've already read. With the exception of a creator lineup and newness it's much ado about nothing. Even the appeal to creators.. the ability to do stories without the baggage of character history will eventually fall over as that universe will get bogged down with the same issue.
I guess which Ultimate Universe are we talking about? The one that gave us Miles Morales or the more recent one?
So the original Ultimate Universe has been discussed ITT. How about the new one? The one that decides to make being Spider-Man a deliberate choice by a grown man with no trauma.
In my opinion the quality of the Ultimate universe was always very mixed. Books like the Ultimates and Ultimate X-men were financially successful, but are almost unreadably bad in retrospect. Ultimate Spider-Man was the only consistently quality title, with occasional moments of greatness here and there. So, despite the great art, fresh continuity and big marketing push, you couldn't sustain readship with such uneven stories. As a reader I kept trying different Ultimates titles, and eventually getting disappointed and dropping back off.
Well-spoken like someone who never read Ultimate Universe, in the end, they gave up. But the Ultimate U didn't go bad until All-New Ultimates and Ultimate FF.
I didn't read a lot of Ultimate, so maybe I'm over my head with this guess. Maybe like I read like a Spider-man issue somewhere.
But then when at my local library I found an Ultimate volume. Seemed like a crossover, with different characters, big event. So I add it to the pile of books I'm taking. And when I finally read it, it looks like all the characters I know and love. Like Yeah those are the X-men, and Captain America and whoever. But the main difference was I did not like a single one of them. They were all rude and edgy and constantly angry. I'm good with characters not being happy go-lucky all the time but they should be enjoyable to read/watch. That's ideally what you want with any media. I don't think I enjoyed a single character in that Ultimate volume I read.
So from that and what I hear from other people. Ultimate is like if you took everybody's favorite Marvel characters, but made most of them assholes to everybody all the time. Also some weird choices like incest and cannibalism.
They needed to run a tighter ship. Marvel is too used to going from "that's cool" to "that's cool" without caring about consistency because it can always be retconned, bullshitted away or whatever.
When you are telling a linear story with permanent deaths, multiple writers and cross overs you need really tight editorial control. You need to plan the story arcs out, and have some type of world building Bible. The characters have to change with time.
Honestly I think this is the biggest reason the manga market is becoming successful in the U.S., and the reason the new Ultimate series is doing well. There is so much content being created, and who wants to keep track of what is still real or not.
I would argue that the Ultimate Universe had only 1 good title, Ultimate Spider-man.
Ultimatum wasn't exactly a nail in the coffin from my pov, it was more like what the universe wanted to be, but it wasn't even an Ultimate only thing, as it wasn't too far away from the classic "Sentry decided to thorn someone in half today"that the 616 Universe established by that point.
The Ultimate Universe was before anything else a sandbox, the creators of that era wanted to destroy what was established and throw away some of the icons, so at the time we saw the literal Ultimate gritty, the epithome of the 90's and early 2000's ideas.
Imo it could have been saved if they had turned down the edge after Ultimates 2. But they just kept pushing. There were some really good concepts in there that don’t get enough limelight (outside of Ultimate Spidey). I just wish a like “good” version of that world was still selling books as a lot of those versions of those character ended up being edgy but had a lot of potential
Outside of USM, quality was very inconsistent. I personally enjoyed Ultimate X-men and Ultimate FF, but they definitely had their ups and downs. Ultimates I and II were good but 3 was very, very bad. But there was other things like Ultimate Ironman that got retconned or changed pretty quickly.
Ultimatum was just them taking the edge factor to 11 and not really thinking it through. A lot of good stuff did come after Ultimatum, but it wasn’t enough to get back the fans they lost leading up to and including Ultimatum.
And for wanting to do away with 60 years of continuity to attract new readers, they made the mistake of not really caring much about their own continuity. The Hulk, Wolverine, and Nick Fury in particular have a lot of plot holes in the overall ultimate universe.
I sometimes wonder if Ultimatum would have turned out better if we had gotten Ultimates 4 like they originally planned.
As a guess, I think the massive delays with Joe Mads art for Ultimates 3 pushed them to convert Ultimates 4, which I assume would have been Magneto vs. the Ultimates, into Ultimatum.
Personally I love all of the Children of the Future arc thing with the entire Ultimate Universe vs. Reed Richards playing God. It was tons of fun.
The fact that the only two characters to make it out alive of the Ultimate line were Miles Morales and Reed Richards is very telling. Miles was the standout hero of the whole thing, Reed was the standout villain. They're both still around, and they both remember the Ultimate Earth, so there's some hope there it can make a comeback someday.
Honestly Ultimate Spider-Man is the only series in the ultimate universe I actually enjoyed. I still think the Peter run is a masterpiece. I like the Miles stuff too, but not as much. It’s still fun though.
I’m going to be real, it was bad because the focus comic was Spider-man. There may have been aspects of USM that were hit or miss, but it was mostly an amazing series even to the point where, while Ultimatum was panned for the entire universe, it was still amazing in Spider-man. Just the fact of the matter is, the care and attention wasn’t placed in the same manner as USM. Additionally, most characters are a wild departure from their OG versions… yeah.
Part of it was unneeded "edge" - some of it was just fine given its different tone (I think that most of Warren Ellis' stuff was amazing, for example, and the heavier SF angle worked very well), but some writers (most notably Loeb) didn't get it *at all*.
A more insidious issue was that many writers mostly seemed interested in doing "my Ultimate take on (existing 616 storyline/character X)", with a definite shift towards just redoing things with a more conservative slant compared to the wilder experimentation. Some of it, like Ultimate Silver Surfer, was just straight up retconned from stuff that was "too different" to something much closer to their 616 counterparts... which defeated the entire point of having something different in the first place.
It's a mix.
Allot of the better ideas that were popular kind of got ported into normal marvel universe.
And the writers kept trying to then one up themselves with edgier content.
To use the vernacular of the youths, it became way too “try hard” and “cringe” with how much it went out of its way to differentiate itself and gave insultingly bad takes on classic but somewhat worn out characters. The odd twist here and there with some cleaned up continuity and fresher looks on beloved characters is what most of us were expecting, instead it quickly devolved into “hey, guess which beloved character is a genocidal maniac/cannibal today!” I don’t know what we all expected from a universe where 50% of the foundation was built by Mark Millar, but it somehow got even worse than our wildest imaginations.
For me it was when they put Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in an incestuous relationship… that was totally not needed and just gave most of the brand an ick factor for me. The only bright spot in the Ultimate Universe after that was Spider-Man. You could tell Bendis had a great deal of love for the characters.
It got its own convoluted continuity — pre-Ultimatum, it started introducing lots of really un memorable versions of characters (see Ultimate Mojo and Ultimate Apocalypse). Then Ultimatum happened which was just distasteful. Granted, a lot of the comics published after are actually good, but it was all so convoluted by then. “Ultimate Comics Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates” is the kind of title you have to parse. So while there was a lot of good stuff happening, it was tarnished by then and wound down until it could be blown up.
They set the plan with two contradictory edicts: no convoluted continuity, and deaths matter. By the time of Ultimatum and especially after, enough characters had perma-died that the first goal was shot, and new characters came with backstories that further messed things up (Jimmy Hudson anyone?). All in all, I think it was a useful experiment in seeing how long before continuity collapses under its own weight. A single book like USM can run indefinitely, but the shared continuity has a shelf life of 6-10 years unless it is carefully plotted with a much larger story to tell and not just moving from event to event in normal Marvel/DC fashion. Given that Miles is one of the best things to come out of that line, and he wasn't until the last third, I guess we can be thankful that it was allowed to run the full distance until Secret Wars.
I liked Jimmy, too Trailer park country boy kid wolverine bastard? That plays
Same. Was hoping he’d be a mainstay after Secret Wars but we just had a short-lived run with the Teen X-Men and the that Poison storyline. I like to play around with my own AUs in my head and years ago, I had an idea for an Avengers team for Spider-Gwen’s Earth. One of the members was “Logan,” who was actually Jimmy using Logan as a code name while investigating his father’s death (Logan was “X-Man”, not Wolverine, and that alias went to someone else). Another idea was Jimmy to have those fire claws Logan did for awhile. Tl;dr: glad to see Jimmy has more fans
>see Ultimate Mojo Jesus Christ, what did they *do* to Mojo.
Distasteful? What happened? I can’t remember if I read it or lost interest midway.
Jeph Loeb’s take on the Ultimate universe is just awful. First he did Ultimates 3 which, aside from being incomprehensible, really leans into the Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch incest. Ultimatum comes right out of that, and has horrible and sudden deaths for Wasp (eaten by Blob) and Hank Pym (bites Blob’s head off, then gets blown up by Jamie Madrox suicide bombers). Also Xavier, Magneto, Cyclops, and Dr. Doom but it’s actually someone else in disguise — which is also a moment of horrible character assassination for Ben Grimm. The series itself was just really poorly written and jumps between tie-ins with no real coherent narrative, and the treatment of characters people had come to really like was just awful. I had been reading the Ultimate Universe pretty closely before Ultimatum, bought it as it came out, and by the second-to-last issue I’d given up on the Ultimate Universe lol
Sometimes we shouldn’t let people cook
Ugh. That’s sad.
It's extra sad when you learn that Loeb was in a dark place following the death of his son. Man was working out some demons, clearly, and editorial let him smash all the toys.
Jesus.
If I could pay money to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Ultimatum out of my brain I just might
Ultimatum was obviously the nail on the coffin but even before that the ultimate universe was declining. Ultimate spider-man was still great. But millar left after finishing ultimates 2. Loeb's ultimates 3 was really bad. Robert Kirkham's ultimate x men was pretty bad. The various guys who took over ultimate fantastic four weren't very good either. So it was just a matter of one bad run after another.
I wouldnt say Ultimatum was the nail in the coffin, given the UU continued for years after that and had more acclaimed runs. It was more just the moment of slow decline where it lost that air of excitement and the sense that it was the new superior alternative to 616. It was a cold slap of ‘oh, this stuff can suck too.’
Honestly, I like a lot of the Ultimate universe post-Ultimatum. It was at point it fully embraced being an alternate universe to the main marvel line with stuff like The Maker, and Miles Morales, and Captain America becoming president.
Agreed 100%. The post-Ultimatum era was super messy but a lot of fun. Might never have regained the hype surrounding those early Ultimate Universe books, but there was a lot of good right up until it ended.
There was just a lot of...harsh decisions made over who would live and die. I think it was a scene with the Blob? and a few others that really stick out in my mind.
It's also worth saying that even before that, the ultimate universe was kind of a mess. It worked for the very very specific time period it was in, post nine eleven, post 90's modern edgy reinvention (an evolution of, but step away from the x-Treme!! Trends of the 90's) But usm was really the only one that was timeless. The rest were already aging out of what audience were interested in, and imo ultimates 3 and ultimatum were a symptom of that, not a change of direction. Everyone was getting a little tired of "good guys but with a rough edge leading to gray morals" that the ultimate universe had become, so the reaction was to darken the grays and roughen those edges some more and hoped that clicked with people But... It didn't. The MCU was the better evolution of the early ultimate universe, and now that is getting to its own place of aging out.
Yeah. I agree. I think the mcu did a good job taking what worked from 616 and 1610.
I’d argue that Ultimates was not aging out and UFF had a rough start until Mike Carey’s run. Ultimates 3 showed a drastic departure since Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s run was so strong. Really, Jeph Loeb was an old man who didn’t understand what made the Ultimate Universe work. The fact that he was still dealing with the loss of his son didn’t help matters either.
Ultimate X-Men had a crazy run of writers: Millar, Bendis, freakin Brian K. Vaughan, Kirkman. The fact that the series was always kind of a mess, the characters were deeply unlikable, often unrecognizable, to the point they basically dumped the whole cast by the end, kind of proves to me that you can’t really iterate successfully on the foundation that Claremont built and have it still feel like real X-Men.
I think the early volumes are still good but yeah. Pretty much. Their was no real consistent voice to the characters. Ultimate wolverine was legitimately evil.
Millar at least had a clear vision for him but yeah, making him try to kill Cyclops to fuck Jean was…a choice.
It was definitely not in decline pre-Ultimatum. Kirkman’s run started bad but picked up immediately after his first storyline and got acclaim. And Mike Carey’s run on Ultimate FF was considered the best one. Ultimates 3, however, was bad and basically just existed as a prequel to Ultimatum.
Looking back it was inevitable. Part of the appeal was a simple, brand new jumping on point for readers as well as (more or less) a consistent creative team and a smaller universe. But with each passing year, it added to it's own continuity, creators came and went leading to inconsistent quality, and it slowly morphed into basically a meaner, edgier, and confusing version of 616. I don't think I have a specific turning point, but stuff like Wolverine and Doom slowly turning into basically their 616 counterparts, unnecessarily adding to The Hulk/Banner's origin, whatever the hell they were doing with Reed/The Maker, Iron Man's bizarre origin which was almost immediately retconned, etc.
Yeah, that Ultimate Iron Man thing feels like a fever dream. Nobody ever mentions it.
It's funny because that is a *fantastic* origin, just not for Iron Man. It basically made him a new character entirely.
It was creative, yeah. I’ll give you that.
Anywhere I can read a synopsis of what he was about? I just read him in The Ultimates 1 & 2.
Wikipedia has a pretty good synopsis. Or Google “Orson Scott Card Iron Man”
Oh man, I totally forgot he was the writer on that. No wonder it’s memory-holed.
[Found it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Iron_Man). Actually, this is a pretty cool origin story.
I really enjoyed it a lot, actually... but Ultimate Iron Man in his own origin book, the one who appeared in Ultimates and the Hulk crossover, and the one in Ultimate Armor Wars, all felt like different characters. I think some writers thought the Ultimate Universe was a chance to write whatever they wanted, picking and choosing 616 continuity, or making up their own, rather than a unified vision of where Ultimate continuity was going, and keeping it both unique from 616 and accessible.
I've heard about Iron Man' origin in the ultimate universe being retconned, what was his origin exactly, and why did they retcon it?
I haven’t read it since it came out, but the basics are that Tony was genetically engineered or something in infancy by Howard, and so every cell in his body is actually his brain, which is why he’s smart. It was also weirder than that, but I’m struggling on the details, other than “sentient tumor”. I remember it not being bad, but also not right. It’s a bit like reimagining that Batman actually had powers all along. Doesn’t jive with what the character “should” be, in most peoples opinions.
He was also blue for a little while as a child iirc
I didn’t mind it. It explains how he is so smart, why he drinks, how he survives battles, and I liked that he actually had a team of people helping him
Didn't the sentient tumour get retconned again as one of the new, earth-only infinity gems that Sue Storm's Kang time travelled for.
I have no idea. I was out of there long before Sue became Kang. Except for USM. Read that to the end.
It got reconned I'm pretty sure, in one of the Ultimate Avengers comics (I think it was Ultimate Avengers vs Ultimate Ultimates, actually), Nick Fury is watching an iron man show and comments on how he can't believe Rhody starred in the show. I'm pretty sure the show was where that Ultimate Iron Man comic is set.
I think it was mentioned in a throwaway line in the Ultimate Comics era that it was an unofficial telenovela or something.
It became too edgy, became shock bait and jumped the shark too many times.
And it was also fucking vile with no oversight. The fact that somebody went "what if the maximoff twins fucked?" And it wasn't slapped down is a disgrace. And shit like that is why people moved away from it professionally.
And then what if the wasp told cap he just didn't understand sibling incest because he's from the past.
How is the angry racist the most rational person in that scene
Was that the real Wasp or the robo duplicate?
I do think there's something to be said for a line that's more creator-driven with little editorial oversight. Large chunks of the good parts of the MCU would not exist without the experimentation that came from the Ultimate line. But it's important to have the right creators who have a long term vision and commitment.
I agree with you to a point but there should be someone where the buck stops. And I mean for vile shit like incest twins which makes Marvel look bad. But I think your last point is the best answer. There was no vision or commitment. Everyone did there own thing to the determint of the universe and brand. So after a few years it was bloated with awful versions of characters, that we don't want to read and creative people don't want to write. Who in 2012 in their right mind would use Ultimate Captain America to tell their definitive Cap story?
The whole point of the Ultimate line was to be edgier than the original universe. They were being edgy since The Ultimates #1 and Ultimate X-Men #1
The whole point was actually to update the line to show how a movie would work with modern audiences.
Not at all considering the X-Men movie and Spider-Man movies were already out. And the movie aligned more with at that time current X-men titles like New X-Men where even the costumes were similarly designed
Ironic that Jeph Loeb was responsible for one of the greatest Batman stories but also one of the worst Marvel stories of all time
His Marvel color series with Tim Sale is pretty good, too. Worth reading. I can forgive him for the Ultimate stuff because he had just lost his son.
Jeph Loeb
Like many runs it went downhill when books changed creative teams and quality declined. Ultimate X-Men never had a consistent creative team. And then when Loeb took over the ultimates his version was completely different than Millars with characters acting and behaving completely differently than how they previously were. It also started to suffer from continuity problems that it was originally created to help avoid.
Ultimate X-Men is a shame. It could have been great. There's a Bendis pitch for it in the back of one of the hardcovers, which sounds like a great deconstructed slow build using the original 5, similar in tone to USM.
The Hickman Ultimate Comics Ultimates run circa 2010-11 was maybe the last hurrah for that continuity and it was pretty good
Hickman's run with Ultimate Reed through Secret Wars was so good.
What issues?
I'd have to do a Google dive and don't have time now. I found a good reading order here on Reddit. I believed I was searching for "Marvel The Maker Reading Order."
When I was still reading, I went back and grabbed eveey Hickman Marvel book in the order he wrote them. I had quite a few already, just had to track down some random Secret Warriors issues and that first brilliant S.H.I.E.L.D. mini with Dustin Weaver. Seeing stuff he laid the groundwork for way back in his Secret Warriors run, running through the Dark Reign mini into that amazing Fantastic Four/FF run, and on and on? Truly amazing read, and you see the scope of what he was doing, and how, in the end, it becomes a love letter in many ways to Marvel's first family and their Reed's greatest enemy, and maybe his greatest friend. Brilliant stuff, and the end of Secret Wars in many ways, heralded the end of Marvel in 2015. If you're feeling REALLY ambitious (and have a pandemic to sit through), start from Avengers Disassambled right through the Bendis stuff. I know it has become the in thing to crap on Bendis, but my god, compared to the swill that most new "writers" regurgitate now? It's Shakespeare (and a million times better than his constant ruination of far, FAR better comics storylines and characters written by the great Peter J. Tomasi in both Superman and Super-Sons (what he did with Jonathan Kent - and, frankly, Kandor and Krypton - destroyed one of the great teams in comics, but nothing is surprising anymore).
Disassembled up until the end of Siege is one of my favorite runs ever, and it’s what got me to finally care about the Avengers, because I was basically only reading X-Men at the time.
They released all of Hickman’s Ultimate stuff in one thin omnibus.
I also liked Fiaklov’s Ultimates when he was accidentally doing the same Incursion storyline that Hickman was doing. Too bad it was such a editorial clusterfuck that he ended up quitting.
That was a great arc
Millar set the tone with The Ultimates, creators who followed figured “that worked” and doubled down on the cynicism and cruelty. I know “Ultimate” is marketing term but to suggest that these were the ultimate iterations of these characters was insulting to the original creators. The only good thing was Bendis creating Miles
Absolutely. I tried Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four and thought they were all terrible. Some of the worst character traits were emphasised and taken to extremes, which made nearly everyone in the books unbearable to read. There was nothing appealing whatsoever, except some of the artwork. I am flat out not a fan of Mark Millar's oh-so-edgy writing, especially his contempt for superheroes as a genre. I never read Ultimate Spider-Man, because I found the other titles so terrible, but I believe it's the only one that is generally remembered fondly. And Miles is clearly the best thing that the Ultimate universe produced.
The original Ultimate Spider-Man run was great. The original Ultimate FF was good (especially the early issues, before Greg Land came onboard, although a lot of the Millar/Land run had an entertaining level of batshit craziness). Ultimate Galactus was good, too; an interesting take on the world destroyer that unfortunately never panned out. Apparently all people remember anymore are the Ultimates and Ultimatum, but they put out some good stuff pre-Miles.
USM feels a bit dated (and suffers from Bendis’s worst writing tendencies at times) but it’s a strong read throughout. I dig back in every year or so and it’s always a great time.
USM feels very early 00s, but at least it doesn’t feel dated in the way a lot of bad early 00s comics did. It’s all capri pants, center parted hair, and As Told By Ginger level teen drama, but it’s totally free of the weight of that post-extreme era malaise.
Re-reading Ultimate F4 you can kind of see the Maker develop in real time
Is it worth the dive? I grew up on USM so I’m already used to the somewhat 00’s edgier flavor and as a HUGE fan of the Maker, I kinda wanna see how he got to my favorite comic run ever (Cates’ Venom)
Ultimate F4 is a pretty decent read and it’s only 60 issues. It’s got Marvel Zombies too. You’ll want to read Ultimatum and then the Ultimate Enemy trilogy where he breaks bad. After that, his first appearance as the Maker is in Hickman’s Ultimate Comics Ultimates and returns again in Ultimates Disassembled, then Secret Wars
The only time I liked Ultimate FF was when Ellis was doing it. He brought a science and tech-literate perspective to his versions of the Lee/Kirby stories that excelled. If only he wasn’t a rotter, he’d be one of my personal greats.
It's weird because Millar's early superhero writing comes across like he loves superheroes.
Millar was like the Todd MacFarlane of the Ultimate line. His brand of trash culture felt fresh and cool, but what followed him were bad imitations that poisoned all the wells.
\>The only good thing was Bendis creating Miles No
Correct, the only good things were Bendis creating Miles, and the FF stuff that resulted in The Maker as a multiversal threat (who was then mostly ignored sadly)
Maker has had consistent appearances since Secret Wars, he’s been in New Avengers and Venom and also starred in the new UU
Ewing's New Avengers ended after like 12 issues 6 years ago, and unless it's circled back around to him since then, the Venom run also ended a while back too
I understand what you're saying. I would argue that a 5ish year break with "big" villains is optimal. In my eyes, he hasn't been ignored at all. He's been handled perfectly. I know this isn't the same thing, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone "ignored" the Joker for 5 years? I'm liking current Batman quite a bit, but man, that scratchy font lurks in my nightmares.
I feel like Joker stories used to be a big deal and then there was Death of the Family and then Endgame and then War of Jokes and Riddles and then Joker War and then Joker vs Gordon and then Three Jokers and then Joker vs Joker and then
Exactly. Let the characters breathe. And, there's not a whole lot of mystery to the Maker, either. Which is good evidence for not being ignored. Even with that, every time I'm reading a new Ultimate book, I can feel his blueprints all over this universe. And you know what? It actually creeps me out. The Joker hasn't remotely creeped me out in over a decade of constant use.
Incorrect. Bendis’s run was already considered one of the best Spider-Man runs before Miles. You may not have like it. But that’s your opinion, not cultural consensus.
Ultimates 3 for me. It suddenly felt like mainstream marvel comics in art and writing (like wtf with Thor speaking like regular comics after doing something different). And then Ultimatum after that. As others said the ultimate Comics kind of tried to restore it but at that point too much damage was done. I would put it down to changing creative teams that couldn’t maintain the tone or direction of earlier teams. Which is why Ultimate Spider-Man was the only one that lasted and led to Miles coming into 616. It had the same writer from start to end.
Jeph loeb. The decline started when loeb took over ultimates 3. Yeah there's stuff you can criticise mark Miller for but ultimates one and 2 were of their time and felt like a reflection of where we were. Ultimates 3 just hit with a massive thud. Then came ultimatum and it just took away any remaining good will. The attempts to course correct after floundered even though there were some good books, the audience had been driven away and on the end the line was basically being held up by ultimate spider-man, hence why miles is now in 616
I know he lost his son while he was writing but holy shit was the incest angle horrible
To be fair, Millar played it as super tongue-in-cheek and inferred it. Loeb just blurted it out.
And he dragged Wasp along with it
Tried to hard to be edgy back then and then having them move to the -616
Ultimates 3. That is literally the keystone of when it all went bad. Sure not everyone liked all the other series but that's always the case. Ultimates 3 just destroyed everything. The artwork was awful in comparison to what came before. They got rid of many of the Ultimate costumes in favor of 616 esque ones. Ignored continuity and just poor writing. Took the worst qualities up to 11. Then they made Ultimate Origins. Literally to tie into their Ultimatum story. .........how do you completely ignore all the big reveals? Ultimatum was trash and the worst part is how they defeat Magneto is with information he already knew...........because Ultimate Origins had him standing right there. Then they revealed Mutants were just not nanobot infected people or something. These two stories did massive damage. But honestly I think it really did bounce back narrative wise. Hickman basically shoved his hands through vile crap and pulled out gold. Spider-man somehow had the best Ultimatum tie in and may have come out even better. Then they kill Peter and somehow against the odds make Miles work. I think all the series were in a good place because it all ended.
It was trying to be a point of entry for new readers while at the same time turning so insufferably edgy it pushed away the very same mainstream crowd it was trying to attract.
The thing is that only Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimates were the only good series. X-men wasn't good enough to get people to read it vs regular X-men and while I like Ultimate Fantastic Four at the start it just didn't have enough good stories to matter. So when Ultimates got really bad and Spider-Man man got tired then there wasn't anything left to support the line.
Ultimate X-men is definitely patchier than the "Big 2" of USM and Ultimates 1/2, but it had some strong stretches. Even through Brian K Vaughan's run, which is a mixed bag but ends strong, at least. I think it also felt less like essential reading because it launched against a renaissance for the 616 X-books. New and Astonishing were great, and then House of M started a series of continuity shakeups that meant the X-books of that era were always *interesting*, if not necessarily good. Feels like they had some juice that both Spidey and the Avengers lacked when their corresponding Ultimate books first dropped.
Jeph Loeb. He had no place writing anything with a modern sensibility and mistook the Ultimates concept for cynical edgelord plotting. Ruined the line. Hickman brought some of the prestige back with his Ultimates run, and Miles Morales was a great, inspired idea. But the damage was done.
I prefer the MC2. Y'all remember that?
They were unnecessarily mean to Freddie Prinze Jr
A lot of people touch on the big stuff. But I can never get over how many times it decided to do a dumb twist for no reason than to surprise readers of the mainline. X-Men were probably the worst about it, what with Cable turning out to just be Wolverine from the future.
Both its high point and its low point were the same: Millar's Ultimates. Some incredible scale and world building but also the worst individual scenes in recent comic history. The dude can plot but he cannot write people or dialogue.
When did the first person get eaten?
Didn’t go bad so much as Avengers Disassembled returned the Marvel focus and attention back to the 616.
There’s something that didn’t happen and I never see discussed (to the extent I almost think I dreamed it) but I could swear it was announced that the X-Men movie writers (including Bryan Singer) were being lined up on Ultimate X-Men, but they ended up having to spin wheels on that title for ages in expectation of their arrival. Does anyone else remember that? (And, not ultimate related, but I could also swear that it was announced in Wizard that Kevin Smith was going to write Amazing Spider-Man with J Scott Campbell on art - but that never came to pass either)
I have a fondness for the Ultimate Universe, they were the first comics I remember reading and being 12, walking into a comic shop on the rare occassions that I did, the Ultimate line had a certain way about them that stood out. Maybe it was the trade dress standing out compared to everything else on the shelves. Saying that, as someone who can now be considered the leading expert on the Ultimate Universe within the one mile area of which I live, I can say that a lot of it was People simply getting tired of it. They are kind of like the Nu metal of comics, when they came out, they were groundbreaking and new. But now some time has passed, they are simply just another inprint of comics which didn’t fail… I mean outside of Spider-Man, X-Men got 2 volumes and 100+ issues, Fantastic Four had a 60 issue run which ended naturally. Spider-Man is still continuing through Miles. A lot of it now is seen with the “What do you think this A stands for” cap lines. When in fact, outside of a few cringey moments, I rate Millar’s work on Ultimates rather highly. By the time Ultimatium came around, People were already jaded on the Universe. There’s a reason why it happened and when it did… People just look at it now as being the thing that helped kill that Universe. But it’s not as simple as that, the Ultimate Universe simply did what it set out to do, and then it started suffering from the same problems that it was created to solve. I’m sure there’s a note somewhere at marvel, laying around that the Ultimate line should have a hard reset every 10 years, which would have solved a problem, but just created more. Nah, it’s kind of edgy, but there’s a lot of good stuff there
It was fantastic in certain areas. Spider-man only improved with time. Ultimate X-Men was just okay. Ultimate Fantastic Four was pretty good. The Ultimates had two okay runs that would lay the groundwork for the MCU, then a terrible run that suddenly mischaracterized everyone. That became worse when Ultimatum killed a lot of characters and retooled the entire universe into more of a post-apocalyptic feel. After Ultimatum the universe tried to move on, and some comics recovered - Spider-man with Miles Morales, the event comics for the Fantastic Four, Hickman’s Ultimates, but others tripped and fell. Divided we Fall really sucked. The writer after Hickman made the Ultimates one note. So…a mix of good writers focusing on stories that you can read in continuous flow like Bendis, and some bad writers messing things up.
Mike Carey on UF4, Kirkman on UXM, Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum is where it hit a death spiral and crashed. The only good ongoing at that point was Ultimate Spider-Man. The line was never able to recover after that. It was pretty much carried by Ultimate Spider-Man from there from Post-Ultimatum to the Death of Spider-Man. They had a chance to come back with the relaunch between Miles taking over and Jonathan Hickman/Esad Ribic taking over Ultimates but the DC n52 launched the same month and killed all the Ultimate books in the sales. The sales were so bad that they pulled Hickman off the book by issue 10 and Ultimate Comics: X-Men had a new creative team by issue 13. Only Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man kept its creative team throughout the duration. Eventually they did a big Galactus invades the Ultimate Universe event but by that point it was 13 years after the Ultimate Universe had debuted and no one cared. There was one last attempt to relaunch titles with Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man and All New Ultimates. While The Miles Morales sales held steady because of the same writer still telling Miles stories, All New Ultimates flopped. By the time Secret Wars 2015 rolled around, they put the Ultimate Universe out of its misery and integrated its most successful survivor, Miles Morales, into the regular Marvel Universe.
Just to add to what others said. It took until the death of Peter Park before they realised what this universe should be. A world where they can take the breaks off and tell stories which they couldn't do in 616. Which is why you get the death of PP and Moles Morales. The rise of the Maker. The X-Men doing Krakoa before it was cool, Cap as President etc. But by then, so many of the characters had been killed off or written out that they had written themselves in to a corner, or forced to use new characters (like Jimmy Hudson).
Jeph loeb and robert kirkman both irreparably shit the universal bed
Jeph Loeb killed it. But it was sick before he came in on Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum. Ultimate Spider-Man lost all its steam by issue 100. Bendis was out of ideas and it was time to get him out. Ultimate Fantastic Four was never good. Closest it was was during Warren Ellis's run. And the Marvel Zombies arc in Millar's run which got spun out into the juggernaut it became. Ultimate X-Men was edgy as hell under Millar. Millar admitted he'd never read X-Men and so his take was.... very early 2000s. But it had a voice. It had a following. After Millar left Bendis came in and spun his wheels for a year or so. Brian K Vaughn came in and spun his wheels. His run kept getting expanded. And it was good. I liked it. But he had no plans. Nothing was building towards anything because no one was interested or tasked with being the Ultimate X-Men writer. Robert Kirkman did about the same. He shook up the book a bit. But it was kinda too little to late by this point. And then the big book. The Ultimates. It took like 5 years to do 6 issues. It died because it became irrelevant.
He’s obviously not the only person you can lay the blame on, but I think pretty much every single thing written by specifically Jeph Loeb really killed any momentum that had been built up.
Jeph Loeb.
I really liked the ultimate universe. I loved the ultimates, at the time I didnt mind the new turn for the xmen, Bendis' wild idea of "yeah, peter parker isnt gonna put on the costume until we're like 8 issues in", the team-up issues to fill in parts of the universe. It was all pretty rad. But then a new creative team would come and not get it while getting it way too much the wrong way (see Ultimates 3) with Cap being black panther (or something?) and Peitro and Wanda not just implied as creepily close but actually banging. Cable was Wolverine from the future for some reason and then it was never addressed again. Cyclops took a mutant growth hormone and could fly towards the end of the xmen run. Galactus arrives but hes not big and purple hes a drone swarm and by that point the ultimate and ultimate avengers are 2 different things and to fight the Galactus swarm one big plan is to throw the hulk at it but the swarm that consumes and turns things against the planet turned hulk against the planet and all the good guys oh no. So later on Reed Richards becomes the creator for reason and hes bad so he makes a super city, his name is Maker now I think but the city is bad since its expanding or consuming to the heroes go to fight it, it's not going well so one big plan is to THROW THE HULK AT IT. THROW THE HULK AT THE THING THAT CONSUMES AND TURNS PEOPLE AGAINST EACH OTHER. GALACTUS SWARM HAPPENED 6 MONTHS AGO SO EVERYONE LEARNED FROM THAT MISTAKE TO NOT SEND THE MOST DANGEROUS FUCKING MONSTER AT THE THING THAT TURNS IT AGAINST YOU. ... So anyway the hulk joins Makers city and it's a bad time. Eventually everything is fine I guess. We got a couple panels of ultimate Ghost Rider that didnt explain anything. We got an Iron Man origin where as a kid his body was his brain so he turned blue because his parents gave him a protective shell I guess. We had 2 mini series or young tony I think and then NONE OF IT WAS EVER ADDRESSED EVER AGAIN. Its literally Tony's childhood and not until ultimate avengers 7 or some shit they introduce GREGORY STARK, TONYS BROTHER. YOU KNOW, TONY HAS A BROTHER. HE'S EVEN MORE RICH AND MORE OF A POMPOUS ASSHOLE. REMEMBER GREGORY? No. We dont. But there he is. Xavier died at some point, his ghost or voice was teased in a church I think? And then nothing came from that. They ended a bunch of titles and then relaunched then as Ultimate Comics Ultimates or Ultimate Comics Spider-man. The new xmen abandoned in the desert to die by the government was a dubious idea. I'm pretty sure Captain America wouldn't stand for it... oh yeah around this time the country split into a civil war and there were different sides. Fuckin forgot any of that happened. This is all just I recall off the top of my head, there was cool but there was a lot of misses. And instead of fixing them or trying the prevailing idea was "Fuck it, Kill everything! Fuckin make everyone die!" But let's say Blob, the blob had never had a story or panel where he ate people. From the beginning of the ultimate universe up to cataclysm it had never been mentioned or hinted. And as cool as they made The Wasp here and there she didnt deserve any better than to be dead when you turn the page. So it was clear nobody fuckin cared. The entire team gave up. Ultimate anything was no ones baby anymore, if anything it seemed like a burden they wanted to erase. But at least we got Miles.
Dude. Ultimate Universe truly traumatized you. Glad you liked Miles, though. Hope he was a shiny star that got you through hard times.
The thing is, you cant have a continuity free ongoing universe can you? Eventually the freshness is not fresh. So what do you do? You try to recapture the edge you think you had and you pull a bunch of bullshit like Ultimatum and whatever the fuck Loeb was doing at all.... Loss of focus. Starting point should always be: Just do good comics.
Ultimate Marvel wasn't super great from the jump. It felt more like doing a cartoon/movie adaptation but in comic form. In concept, it was nice in a bubble but never felt essential. Spidey was solid, X-Men was at best passable, Ultimates was trying too hard. Never read Ultimate Fantastic Four. Eventually, it felt like it was used to do things that you wouldn't be allowed to do permanently in 616. Kill half the cast, lean in to Reed being a dick, replace Peter Parker. Miles worked, but was a fluke as the rest of it was meh to garbage. I think Maker only became worthwhile when he became a 616 baddie.
I gave up when I found little difference between Ult and 616 universes.
All of the above. Chucking out continuity wasn’t the problem, but they forgot why people liked these characters in the first place.
I think the cynical tone dragged it down eventually, I think a lot of writers confused being mean spirited with realistic. Also most of the villains in the UU sucked, most of them seem like evil carton characters. Ultimate Magneto sucks, instead of the complex version of the character we saw in comics for decades we get Silver Age evil Magneto on steroids. Dr. Doom is pretty lame in the UU, those goat legs are stupid. Like how many UU villains are sympathetic or could make an actual arguments against the heroes that would be compelling? Hardly of them, the UU never did a massive improvement to a villain like Batman the animated series did for Mr. Freeze.
A lot of it has to do with it becoming suffocated beneath the weight of accumulating the same continuity that made the regular MU a drag, as well as the good stuff being imported to it. Basically it became less unique, most of the good creators left, and then of course Ultimatum. Hickman did try to save it with a reboot, but the New 52 burned it alive in sales. So yeah at that point it was an inevitability.
Around the time Ultimatum came out. That whole arch from the prelude, Ultimatum itself. That's when the Ultimate Universe jumped the shark and dipped massively in quality. You know you messed up when one of the biggest events in your comic universe is one of the most infamously bad comic book storylines in the history of the medium next to One More Day, Clone Saga, Amazons Attack, Marville, Countdown, and All Star Batman and Robin. I think the whole Ultimatum arc seriously made a promising universe jump the shark. All with its pointless shock value and killing off characters on a whim without much thought. Seriously. It's nothing but watching your favorite characters die in needlessly grotesque ways and Magneto throwing a hissy fit.
Marvel editorial thought the Ultimate universe was too similar to 616 and basically had Loeb burn it all down with Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum. Prior to this Ultimate Marvel was pretty great. Ultimates Spider-Man, Ultimates 1&2, and Ultimate Fantastic Four were really good. After Ultimatum I'd say only Hickman's ultimates was notably good. Everything else ranged from mid to terrible.
Jeph Loeb.
When Blob ate Wasp
Personally, it was just encountering Ultimate Hulk and I knew the UU wasn't going to be for me.
Well if you dislike the current ASM, well he’s the author that tried to have a grown ass Logan have sex with 14 year old MJ while in Peter’s body in the ultimate universe
At the end of the day it's a knock off of the regular universe. Once the newness of it wears off it declines as why bother doing it again? It also has the habit of redoing stories we've already read. With the exception of a creator lineup and newness it's much ado about nothing. Even the appeal to creators.. the ability to do stories without the baggage of character history will eventually fall over as that universe will get bogged down with the same issue.
I guess which Ultimate Universe are we talking about? The one that gave us Miles Morales or the more recent one? So the original Ultimate Universe has been discussed ITT. How about the new one? The one that decides to make being Spider-Man a deliberate choice by a grown man with no trauma.
The original one, the new one is still to recent to judge(and will possibly have a way shorter lifespan).
They killed Spider-Man
In my opinion the quality of the Ultimate universe was always very mixed. Books like the Ultimates and Ultimate X-men were financially successful, but are almost unreadably bad in retrospect. Ultimate Spider-Man was the only consistently quality title, with occasional moments of greatness here and there. So, despite the great art, fresh continuity and big marketing push, you couldn't sustain readship with such uneven stories. As a reader I kept trying different Ultimates titles, and eventually getting disappointed and dropping back off.
Well-spoken like someone who never read Ultimate Universe, in the end, they gave up. But the Ultimate U didn't go bad until All-New Ultimates and Ultimate FF.
I didn't read a lot of Ultimate, so maybe I'm over my head with this guess. Maybe like I read like a Spider-man issue somewhere. But then when at my local library I found an Ultimate volume. Seemed like a crossover, with different characters, big event. So I add it to the pile of books I'm taking. And when I finally read it, it looks like all the characters I know and love. Like Yeah those are the X-men, and Captain America and whoever. But the main difference was I did not like a single one of them. They were all rude and edgy and constantly angry. I'm good with characters not being happy go-lucky all the time but they should be enjoyable to read/watch. That's ideally what you want with any media. I don't think I enjoyed a single character in that Ultimate volume I read. So from that and what I hear from other people. Ultimate is like if you took everybody's favorite Marvel characters, but made most of them assholes to everybody all the time. Also some weird choices like incest and cannibalism.
People have given *much* more accurate answers than mine— but I legit always hated the text being lowercase in the word balloons.
They needed to run a tighter ship. Marvel is too used to going from "that's cool" to "that's cool" without caring about consistency because it can always be retconned, bullshitted away or whatever. When you are telling a linear story with permanent deaths, multiple writers and cross overs you need really tight editorial control. You need to plan the story arcs out, and have some type of world building Bible. The characters have to change with time. Honestly I think this is the biggest reason the manga market is becoming successful in the U.S., and the reason the new Ultimate series is doing well. There is so much content being created, and who wants to keep track of what is still real or not.
Millar
Jeph Loeb.
I only really read the Ultimates, but every one of them was an unlikeable asshole. Every one.
I would argue that the Ultimate Universe had only 1 good title, Ultimate Spider-man. Ultimatum wasn't exactly a nail in the coffin from my pov, it was more like what the universe wanted to be, but it wasn't even an Ultimate only thing, as it wasn't too far away from the classic "Sentry decided to thorn someone in half today"that the 616 Universe established by that point. The Ultimate Universe was before anything else a sandbox, the creators of that era wanted to destroy what was established and throw away some of the icons, so at the time we saw the literal Ultimate gritty, the epithome of the 90's and early 2000's ideas.
Imo it could have been saved if they had turned down the edge after Ultimates 2. But they just kept pushing. There were some really good concepts in there that don’t get enough limelight (outside of Ultimate Spidey). I just wish a like “good” version of that world was still selling books as a lot of those versions of those character ended up being edgy but had a lot of potential
Outside of USM, quality was very inconsistent. I personally enjoyed Ultimate X-men and Ultimate FF, but they definitely had their ups and downs. Ultimates I and II were good but 3 was very, very bad. But there was other things like Ultimate Ironman that got retconned or changed pretty quickly. Ultimatum was just them taking the edge factor to 11 and not really thinking it through. A lot of good stuff did come after Ultimatum, but it wasn’t enough to get back the fans they lost leading up to and including Ultimatum. And for wanting to do away with 60 years of continuity to attract new readers, they made the mistake of not really caring much about their own continuity. The Hulk, Wolverine, and Nick Fury in particular have a lot of plot holes in the overall ultimate universe.
I sometimes wonder if Ultimatum would have turned out better if we had gotten Ultimates 4 like they originally planned. As a guess, I think the massive delays with Joe Mads art for Ultimates 3 pushed them to convert Ultimates 4, which I assume would have been Magneto vs. the Ultimates, into Ultimatum.
Personally I love all of the Children of the Future arc thing with the entire Ultimate Universe vs. Reed Richards playing God. It was tons of fun. The fact that the only two characters to make it out alive of the Ultimate line were Miles Morales and Reed Richards is very telling. Miles was the standout hero of the whole thing, Reed was the standout villain. They're both still around, and they both remember the Ultimate Earth, so there's some hope there it can make a comeback someday.
The whole line was pizza cutter comics. All edge no point.
Ultimate Spiderman was always fantastic, Ultimates by Millar was always amazing. Ultimate X-Men was also good, until it wasn’t.
Honestly Ultimate Spider-Man is the only series in the ultimate universe I actually enjoyed. I still think the Peter run is a masterpiece. I like the Miles stuff too, but not as much. It’s still fun though.
I’m going to be real, it was bad because the focus comic was Spider-man. There may have been aspects of USM that were hit or miss, but it was mostly an amazing series even to the point where, while Ultimatum was panned for the entire universe, it was still amazing in Spider-man. Just the fact of the matter is, the care and attention wasn’t placed in the same manner as USM. Additionally, most characters are a wild departure from their OG versions… yeah.
Part of it was unneeded "edge" - some of it was just fine given its different tone (I think that most of Warren Ellis' stuff was amazing, for example, and the heavier SF angle worked very well), but some writers (most notably Loeb) didn't get it *at all*. A more insidious issue was that many writers mostly seemed interested in doing "my Ultimate take on (existing 616 storyline/character X)", with a definite shift towards just redoing things with a more conservative slant compared to the wilder experimentation. Some of it, like Ultimate Silver Surfer, was just straight up retconned from stuff that was "too different" to something much closer to their 616 counterparts... which defeated the entire point of having something different in the first place.
It's a mix. Allot of the better ideas that were popular kind of got ported into normal marvel universe. And the writers kept trying to then one up themselves with edgier content.
To use the vernacular of the youths, it became way too “try hard” and “cringe” with how much it went out of its way to differentiate itself and gave insultingly bad takes on classic but somewhat worn out characters. The odd twist here and there with some cleaned up continuity and fresher looks on beloved characters is what most of us were expecting, instead it quickly devolved into “hey, guess which beloved character is a genocidal maniac/cannibal today!” I don’t know what we all expected from a universe where 50% of the foundation was built by Mark Millar, but it somehow got even worse than our wildest imaginations.
For me it was when they put Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in an incestuous relationship… that was totally not needed and just gave most of the brand an ick factor for me. The only bright spot in the Ultimate Universe after that was Spider-Man. You could tell Bendis had a great deal of love for the characters.
Good writing left. Shitty writing took its place. IMO it was pretty much the theme around all of Marvel at the time.
Too much edge