Ultimatum

Man I like comics. I do. I think it has to do with the style of story telling or some such thing. Or maybe it is the intersection of two art forms from two individuals to create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or something. I don't know.

What I do know is the Loeb penned something called Ultimatum and it is supposed to be one of the most horrendus comic atrocities produced in the last ten years. Tonight I read it.

See some comic book fans are insular, whiny, arrogant sons of bitches. People like the "comic book guy" from the simpsons, yeah they exist. They are even yellow and have 4 fingers. When big shake ups happen then tend to flood the internet in droves speaking as one, they make the ten minuts of hate look like a boxed social. I swear. So I tend to take the horrid gnashing of teeth with a grain of salt, and bravely I went to Barns & Noble for a diffrent purpose. Having failed in that purpose I sat down and read Ultimatum.

It was terrible.

First the trade. Lets talk about it on a superficial level. The trade itself is incompleate. The idea of a trade is to take the core of the story and stick it in one place for easy centralized reading. Some when I am reading a trade and all the sudden, Spiderman is dead, the hulk went on a rampage, the dread Dommuru is stalking the earth with Jonny Storm trapped in his pendent, and Dr Strange dies in some pathetic way...well yeah. We are literally dropped from a page of dfialouge into the middle of a fightscene with absolutely no context. Clocking in at a measly 144 pages, the book itself could of done with another couple of comics worth of information just to help make sense of it all.

And you know it is bad when I focus on the superficial stuff first.

The store itself is...well it is kinda pathetic. Magneto reverses the earth's polarity causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, blah blah blah. That sucks. Lots of snazzy people died in the initial wave of destruction, like Night Crawler and The Human Torch, as well as some others. So everyone geared up to go fight the big M himself. The thing is they couldn't kill him right away. They needed him to fix the earth magnets so our planet wouldn't go spinning out of orbit. As a result more heros died.

Here is the thing though. With the exception of Professor X and Thor, the way these people died is the same way red shirts die in start treck, or the way no name officers get cut down in Dynasty Warriors. They were dispatched with nary a second thought. Dr. Strange charged as Dommeru and ends up dead less than an instant later.

See I am all for putting a bomb in a clostet and clearing house of charecters that are dragging the narration down but this is rediculose. It is almost like the inverse of plot immunity. You must die for the body count will rise and it will add to the tragidy. People reduced to rosencrantz and guildenstern marching fowards for the readers...what? At the end of the day if feels as if nothing has been accoplished. Sure sure Marvel's ultimate universe is now a very diffrent place than the regular one. I predict that Woliverien will be back but really what was the editor thinking when he green lighted this mess?

Oh and mutants were all built in a lab by people to be super soldiers SUPRISE! Come come now. All in all it feels less like something that has been written and carefully planned out and more of just covering every square inch of the ultimate marvel universe in dirt calling it extream and then making the X extra big with senseless death and pointless revelations.

I'm sure this series has it's fans. They are strange. I am not one of them.

I am glad I read it though. Sometimes it is good to read something ultimatly aweful just to center yourself on what is really worth reading.

For example I read Irredemable immeadiatly afterwards. Now that was worth while.