Ultimate Mystery 1! No, it’s not Ultimate Enemy #5, silly. Sure, it’s got the exact same creative team and picks up where #4 left off, but you’d be a fool to say it’s not a whole new series! I do not understand. But, ultimately (haaaaa), the story is more important than the name. We get rolling with Wendell Vaugh[a]n, top man at Project Pegasus, receiving a visit from Dr. Philip Lawson, who he believes has been sent to replace him. Lawson asks for a tour. Of course, nerds may know Dr. Philip Lawson is in fact Mar-Vhel, aka Captain Marvel, introduced in the previously mentioned Ultimate trilogy of miniseries by Warren Ellis, et al., and barely seen since.
As far as I know, “the break-ins” are just the Serpent Squad. Twice. Not exactly serious business, but I guess they did get inside both times.
A decidedly different take on Captain Marvel. But, this series is a Spider-Man comic to me, high time we went to see our guy, and he’s swinging off like the end of last issue, with the big 2-page splash awkwardly cropped and repurposed as a single panel, even, when Spider-Woman catches up to him, and they have Bendis’ 2nd exposition chat in recent posts, which is unusual. It’s very old school. “I can’t be dealing with my female clone right now!” Like, there’s only one reason he’d bother to tell her she’s female, and that’s to tell you, 1970s-style. She says she knows what happened at his house, and he asks if she was behind it.
Heck of a splash!
Awkward stuff. Meanwhilst, a mutating Ben Grimm is killing everyone and yelling that he can’t stop. Just kidding, Sue is having a nightmare. She wakes up to find her brother asleep, and a figure in the dark says she fainted last night.
So, yeah. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. It offers an explanation for why Ben is the only one who permanently turned into something else, while also doing something you could never get away with in the mainline comics. I mean, someone could try, but he’d inevitably turn rocky again when a new creative team came in. But here, in the new Ultimate line, as the marketing tells us, “there are no rules,” so you really can radically alter the Thing. Fury and Danvers come in and tell them they’re all officially Agents of SHIELD now, and their job is to find out why Reed was killed. Then we’re back to PP, where a genuinely funny conversation has Lawson explaining he’s an alien and then learning he’s coming off snarky when he’s trying to sound cool. He says Earth TV confuses him. Be he doesn’t get a chance to defend basing his personality on TV, because alarms go off, and he flies into battle.
He’s back! This is slotting into continuity where I put it pretty well so far. Will that hold? I don’t remember. Destruction! Look out!