Ok, big finish. Who’s ready to have some fun with their comics 2nite?
Well, hopefully not you, we aren’t doing fun right now. In a 2-page spread, Magneto proceeds to let Wolverine slash him up while yelling terrible dialogue despite him being full of metal. I don’t get anything about that, I’ll tell ya that for free. He’s had an arm removed, he’s getting clawed up, and he’s just goin’ with it. Ok! Wolverine says he’s killed millions. I think, and I’m no scientist, but I think if you really changed the poles of the Earth abruptly, you’d kill just about everybody. But, sure, millions. Anyway:
A lot of metal going up against the magnet guy. I mean, that’s on y’all.
Killing Wolverine is a pretty crazy thing to do. But that was the point. You know, comparing this mess to Disassembled, which I can’t help but keep doing, this is a lot worse. My biggest complaint is it’s too much at once. Disassembled was a lot, a chaotic and very eventful 3 issues. But it was always on topic. All the action really happened in just 2 locations, and everyone who was anyone was there. This series has stuff happening all over the place, some of it only tangentially related to the event, like Thor’s quest into the underworld (That sure worked out). It’s too much. It feels like it should have been longer, except for the fact that that would mean I had to read more of it. And, sure, some of it has been expanded on in USM, and presumably also UXM and UFF, but they didn’t even have Ultimates tie-ins for this. There’s just not enough room for all those nonsense. Maybe they could’ve made it land as more than just wholesale slaughter and shock for the sake of it with more pages. I mean, probably not, with Loeb at the helm, but if they had someone else do it. I don’t know. This series has felt like the Cliff’s Notes version. Anyway, in the bowels of the floating island, Hulk and Colossus are smashing things up when Mystique tries to kill them with a flamethrower. This makes Hulk declare that he’s going to eat her.
Oh, sure, ok. Fury has Jean open his mind to Magneto, to reveal to him the truth, that mutants were made in a lab. He says, in a way, that makes all this his fault, not Magneto’s, since he hid that info from the world. Kind of hilarious to me that this was revealed all of the month before Ultimatum started. To say this all feels rushed would be an insult to rushed things. Well, now that Erik knows the truth, guess what?
Him living long enough to die that way with a missing arm and his chest slashed open borders on comedy. But, hooray for summary executions! Well, anyway, everyone packs up and takes off, leaving Magneto’s base to crash into the sea. They don’t take Wolverine’s remains for burial, which is weird to me. Hulk and Colossus are ok, by the way. Eight days later, Cyclops is giving a speech, trying to talk America out of a law that will force mutants to turn themselves in or be killed (really!), when he is, of course, shot in the face. I mean, what else could have happened?
Stuck the landing! A terrible end to a terrible series, 10/10! Really nailed it. Right down to the “dedication” to the people who “started it all,” which doesn’t include a single artist! It’s 2009, who in comics cares about some dumb ol’ artist, anyway? Well, at least it’s over. The Ultimate U is forever changed, in a way you could never pull off in the regular books. Which, of course, was the point. To try to inject some life into the line by shaking it up. In the wake of these events, the remaining X-Men go underground. Rather than a new X-Men comic, there follows a thing called Ultimate X, where we meet the secret son of Wolverine, Jimmy Hudson. This was by Jeph Loeb and the great Art Adams, and the participation of the latter made it so fraught with delays that any impact it could’ve had was completely blunted. It managed all of 5 whole issues over a staggering 16 months and disappeared with little fanfare. The Ultimate FF split up, Sue and Reed also split up, no more FF. The big hero team reforms as the Ultimate Avengers, finally ditching the awful name The Ultimates, with Mark Millar once again returning to the helm to ensure the book will suck, joined by Carlos Pacheco on art. But what of Spider-Man? Is he really dead? If they were willing to kill Wolverine, they could kill anybody. Would they?