Is Ben about to blow up? An explosive way to end a series! He’s glowing purple and losing rocks rapidly as SHIELD is ordered to fall back.
SHIELD now has the guy, who really does look like K’ilowog from Green Lantern, in a big energy field. Carol continues trying to reason with it, but gets silence. So Nick Fury walks in and starts hitting it with a baseball bat. Different styles.
Rough stuff. Ben’s body begins to convulse, and then glow purple again, and Sue yells for someone to do something. Meanwhile, Nick Fury beating the alien with a bat isn’t getting him anywhere, when in walks Ultimate Hawkeye, who is more like Bullseye, here to do the real torturing. Everyone leaves the room, and then they all hear screams from inside. Any Ultimate thing that didn’t come from USM is basically awful, man. It’s so weird how USM is one of the absolute best superhero comics of the 21st Century, and the rest of the line… is also present. Eventually, they don’t even really know what to do with it, they blow it up with Ultimatum to try to do something really different, there’s nothing particularly worth honoring or keeping… except USM, too good to blow up, and largely spared. You know? It’s weird. “Man, the Ultimate line was so good! Well, some of it. Well, USM was.” Even Bendis himself couldn’t hit another homerun, co-creating the really misguided Ultimate FF. The Ultimate Universe is one totally essential comic book and a bunch of stuff that no longer matters to anyone. Even the original run of the Ultimates, despite being a huge hit and (for better or worse) a lot of the MCU’s DNA… no one talks about that book anymore. At all. But USM remains beloved.
Kind of a huge moment to not happen in or be referenced in the mainline USM title at all. Due to all I blathered about above, any comic with Ultimate Spider-Man in it is an Ultimate Spider-Man comic to me, but with such big Peter Parker stuff happening here, this especially feels that way. Just a USM arc with a whole lotta guest stars. Back at SHIELD, Hawkeye has gotten the thing to talk, and…
…it’s maybe the first instance?… certainly an early instance of a real late-period Bendis trope, which is a character very correctly calling out how flawed America or indeed the entire world is, all the problems the human race has created for itself and allowed to continue, and… they’re the bad guys. Like the superheroes never stand up and talk about how our governments are corrupt and the people of most nations are badly mistreated and what have you. It’s always villains in Bendis comics. That’s weird to me. Except for in Scarlet, where it’s the hero, but it doesn’t amount to anything. The thesis of that comic felt like “everything is wrong and I don’t know what to do,” which, while certainly relatable, isn’t the most compelling narrative. It’s a good first act, you know? But a character can’t just solve police brutality or whatever, so it doesn’t go anywhere. Bendis will later do a big DC crossover event rooted in a character saying “the governments of the world are no longer serving their people,” and he’s the bad guy. Like, what? “During the first Trump administration, Superman fights for the status quo!” It’s a weird thing to do. Repeatedly. At any rate, ol’ scary says some more cryptic stuff and then expands into the goo that blew up the Baxter Building, blowing up whatever facility he’s in, which doesn’t seem to be the Triskelion. Carol and Fury and a bunch of people escape, but they’re no closer to solving anything, and we’re running out of pages.
It’s frankly comical to call this 3 different miniseries. How is that an ending?? And next time, we’ll look at the first issue of the next series, and all that’s changed is the cover artist. Weird choices.