Ultimates 3 #5

Previously in Ultimates 3: The team in the Savage Land joins forces with Ka-Zar, Shanna and their people to attack Magneto, Hank Pym rescues the Wasp from robots disguised as Iron Man and Captain America, Sabretooth and Hawkeye fight, Black Panther and Wolverine are attacked by the Juggernaut, Valkyrie is attacked by Mastermind and Pyro, Thor touches Unus the Untouchable only to be vanquished by Magneto, and Pym leads Wasp to the robotic villain living in their basement. (More here).

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So there’s been a lot of yelling and fighting sexing so far, but remember what the name of this story is? Er, yeah, it’s “Sex, Lies and DVD.” But remember what they changed the name to, for the purposes of the cover? Yes, that’s right, Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?.

It is time we find out, as our heroes Ant-Man and Wasp listen to the robot Yellowjacket record a report, which he addresses “to my creator Henry Pym.”

“You sought to provide androids to S.H.I.E.L.D. as a replacement for super soldiers," he says. "You called it Project Ultron.”

It’s true! He did! In Ultimates Vol. 2, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. This was when Pym was on the outs with the team for beating his wife and having ants attack her. Remember? He tried to give Fury some androids, and there was a scene where Scarlet Witch was talking to one, and Pietro was like, “Were you flirting with that machine?”

This was just a little Easter Egg type thing, since in normal Marvel Universe continuity, Wanda and android The Vision would fall in love, get married and I think maybe even have some magic kids or something…? It was so funny a joke, Millar re-used it at the end of the second volume, when Scarlet Witch asks an Ultron robot out on a date after they liberate America from the Liberators (on whose side Pym and the Ultrons fought

Or was it?

“Something happened to my original programming. Something…unexpected, Ultron/Yellowjacket says. “It was as if I were under some kind of spell. Improbable. Impossible. But…she was, after all…a witch.”

So Ultron fell in love with, and became obsessed with Wanda, even while he was demoted to a butler android in Ultimates Mansion. That’s right! There were androids serving drinks on the very first page!

It was Ultron who made and leaked the sex tape, and he created a Venom robot to capture the Scarlet Witch, which explains why Venom didn’t look like Ultimate Venom much.

There was some kind of flaw in Ultron’s design for his robot constructions though, so that when his robots were destroyed, they would melt. He knew Pym would notice, so Ultron drugged him. And then he used the time-honored trench coat and wide-brimmed hat disguise that Ben Grimm and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles use to walk unseen in New York City to trail Wanda and Pietro:

Not at all suspicious.

“It was a crime of passion,” Ultron says. “And no one suspected the butler did it.”

Considering that the murder weapon was a bullet programmed specifically to home in on Wanda’s D.N.A., and to also maybe be able to dodge or somehow compensate for possible super-speed interference from Quicksilver, that’s one well planned-out crime of passion.

On the fourth page of this explain-athon, Ultron talks about renaming himself Yellowjacket and to build robot versions of the Ultimates, and that his robot duplicates worked much better when he had live hosts to extract DNA from, which is why he has Tony Stark in a big basin of fluid.

Back in the Savage Land, Magneto is in the process of raining pink lightning on Shanna, Ka-Zar and their people, when Yellowjacket and his Ultimates attack. This seems contrary to his plan as he had previously announced it, to wait until Magneto and mutantkind’s war with humanity was over in order to claim earth for robotkind, but whatever, this book’s almost over, let’s just go with it.

Stowing away on Yellowjacket's shape is Tony “Iron Man” Stark, freed by the Wasp and Ant-Man, and wearing an all-black stealth suit which, we’ll see later, has War Machine-style gun shoulder-pad thingees.

“Elsewhere in The Savage Land,” Juggernaut is pounding on the Black Panther, whose costume is so torn up that now we can even see blond hair sticking out of his mask. Oh man, who is this guy?!

Juggernaut is about to say that “nothing can stop the Juggernaut” for like the third time in two issues, when all of a sudden he is impaled by the biggest fucking triceratops ever, and Wolverine, who is riding on it, quips, “Yeah, yeah, we know… last time I heard that one, I fell off my dinosaur.”

Wolverine is about to finish off Juggy—who apparently not even a triceratops in the gut can stop—when Black Panther catches Captain America’s shield (thrown by the about to arrive Iron Man) and then takes off his mask.

Oh my God! It’s Captain America! That’s why the two of them were never in the same place at the same time! (Except on covers). And that’s why Panther wouldn’t talk! And why Captain America was the only one who knew anything about Panther! And why Logan recognized the Panther even though he was disguised, because he could smell him!

Wasp is all, like, “You were the Black Panther? What the fuck, Captain America? That makes like no sense.”

And he says, “We’ll discuss it later, Jan.” This is a lie; it is not discussed later.

You may not remember, because I didn’t scan it or summarize it because there were so many crazy awful things happening that issue, but in the very first issue, Wasp asked Captain America why he didn’t respond when she called for him during the Venom attack episode, and he responded tersely that “I had to get a life of my own, Janet.”

See, he needed time away from The Ultimates, so, naturally, the best way to do this was to invent another identity so he could be an Ultimate in a different costume, or…yeah Captain America, that makes no fucking sense!

Back at the scene of Valkyrie’s attempted rape, Mastermind assures Pyro that his victims never wake up as he’s licking a crying, paralyzed Valkyrie’s face, when suddenly a mysterious figure appears in her hallucination about not being able to pay the rent. The figure explodes open the door behind which the landlord was just knocking, and says in a scratchy font, “I did not give you power so that you could die this day. We made a bargain. And you intend to keep it. Go now. Slay your enemies.”

Oh, so that’s why Valkyrie has powers now—she made a bargain with her landlord.

No, actually, it’s never revealed who the fuck this guy is. Wouldn’t want to tie up all the loose ends. Loeb might want to explore that in future issues of—oh yeah, this is the last issue of the series. Well, maybe in the next volume of the—oh, right, right. There is no next volume of the series. Huh.

Anyway, Valkyrie says “Men.” And then she chops off Mastermind’s head. And Pyro holds up his hands and tries to explain this wasn’t his idea, and she chops off both of his hands.

The Robo-Ultimates attack Magneto, causing him to lose his hold on Thor, whom he says he was holding “at the earth’s core.” Ultron informs Magneto that although he and his team are androids, there isn’t any metallic alloy on them. And then “KRAKA-THOOM” the real Thor appears holding his hammer, and he’s so pissed his back muscles are four times bigger than the last time we saw him.

Then the real Ultimates show up, Loeb walks away from his laptop, and a fourth-grade boy apparently climbs in an open window and scripts the dialogue for the next few pages.

Check this shit out:
Ha ha ha ha! Yellowjerk!

You know what we haven’t had this whole issue? A two-page splash!

Well, here’s one, featuring the two squads of Ultimates fighting. That’s followed by five panels checking in with each pair of combatants, in which terrible lines are spoken.

The Wolverine vs. Hulk panel is kind of amusing though. “I kinda wish you were the real Hulk. Me and him got unfinished business.” Wolverine says. This would have been published during Damon Lindeloff’s three-year break between issues of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk, see.

You know, Loeb may be a terrible, terrible comic book writer, and this may be the worst comic book every published by professionals (that I’ve read. I’ll try to follow up on some of your suggestions in the comments over the last few days). But at least he can write 22-pages of shitty comic every 30 days, and work in television simultaneously. It took Damon Lindeloff over three years to write about 132 pages of shitty comic (Well, the first half was pretty shitty; I gave up after the break, but it was basically just a fight comic. Lindeloff wasn’t writing From Hell or The Black Dossier or something requiring years of rigorous research).

Oh, wait, the dialogue gets worse than that last panel I scanned.

Yellowjacket tells Wasp that he’d rather not kill her, because “You’re almost like a mother to me.”

Ant-Man grows to human-size behind him, puts him in a headlock and says, "Then I guess that makes me--"
I…I don’t have words for this.

Okay, with Yellowjacket/Ultron’s head ripped off, the robots all collapse, and now it’s just Magneto staring down the Ultimates. While they’re talking, crazy old Hawkeye grabs a sharp piece of junk, shoves it into his crossbow gun, and shoots it at Magneto.

But, this:
Quicksilver takes it in the chest, saving his dad! He doesn’t use his super-speed to knock his dad out of the way, he doesn’t catch it, or put a piece of wood or rock or metal in front of it, he doesn’t even put a non-vital part of his body in front of it, he just uses his super-speed to get his chest in front of it.

Pietro is the world’s dumbest super-speedster.

As to why Magneto, using all his vaunted powers, couldn’t deflect the projectile, I wondered that myself upon the first reading, but there’s a pretty good chance that it was a piece of non-metal alloy taken from one of the destroyed Robo-Ultimates (The panel showing Hawkeye picking it up also features the robot Iron Man’s head on the ground next to it).

Magneto has now lost both of his kids to the Ultimates, and he’s so pissed that he uses his incredible powers that were unable to stop piece of plastic garbage shot out of a gun/cross-bow to lift his entire base up into the sky. Thor tires to give chase, but Magneto snatches his hammer from his hands and sends Thor hurtling to the earth below.

Here is Magneto, being very sad:
But what’s this? Pietro’s dead body is crying? Well then, obviously he’s not dead, right? Did Magneto not bother to take a pulse?

Well anyway, that’s the end of Ultimates 3 #5. We still don’t know who Valkyrie’s benefactor was, or where Pietro hid his sister’s body, or what’s up with his crying not-dead body, but hey, at least the question on the cover was answered. Ultron killed The Scarlet Witch.

Or wait, still one page to go…?
Oh yes, of course. It was Dr. Doom, a character who never appeared in the series at all, or was ever even mentioned in it, who was actually behind it all. That’s actually a pretty fitting end to this terrible, terrible comic book series.

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Next: There is no next, that’s the end! Thank God Loeb and Madureira didn’t actually do the 12 issues of this volume that was originally announced, huh? I know Loeb follows this up with Ultimatum, which is still ongoing, and thus unavailable to borrow from the library for a few months yet, but I suppose I’ll check that out when it is available. If anything has a chance of taking the Worst Comic Ever crown from Ultimates 3, Ultimatum sure seems like a contender.

Or maybe I’ll see about tracking down Ultimate Power, once I recover from this week.

Ultimates 3 #4

Previously in Ultimates 3: Wolverine flashbacked up the joint, explaining how this one time he had sex with Wanda and Pietro’s mom and then a jealous Magneto magnet-ed him down a mountain, then he explained how Wanda made all the dinosaurs in the Savage Land through magic to stop him from killing Pietro, and how he watched as Pietro and Wanda discover a kind of love that “no one in this room can really understand” (because it is incest), Wolverine and most of the team traveled to the Savage Land to recover Wanda’s body from Magneto and there they met Ultimate Ka-Zar, Ultimate Shanna and Ultimate Zabu, and, back in New York, Iron Man revealed himself to be a robot who captured The Wasp (More here).

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And now, the penultimate issue of Ultimates 3, and this one is all fight. Except for a dumb flashback. And some dumb robot shit. But there is a lot of fighting!

This one actually opens at a point in the past, a point so far back in the past that it’s colored black and white (It’s after the Wolverine-sexes-up-Magneto’s-girl flashback though, and that was in color, so who knows).

“Eight hundred miles off the coast of Australia. Years ago,” the gray caption box says, above a panel of a plane. Young, bald Charles Xavier is in the pilot’s chair, talking about this young mutant Aborigine he’s found to his pissed-off looking friend Eric, whose all “Who gives a shit about your dumb shit Xavier, all I care about is that my children find a home.”

His children are, of course, Pietro and Wanda, who are very little here. Wanda’s scared of flying, and just as Pietro’s promising that nothing will ever happen to her as long as he’s with her, the wing BOOMs off, and the plane crashes.

Assuming the plane was made out of metal, why didn’t Magneto just float it down safely? I don’t know. He does use his mastery of magnetism to dramatically clear some wreckage out of the way as they walk away from the crash.

Oh, and as the plane is going down, look who spots it:
Lil’ Ka-zar, Lil’ Shanna the Lil’ She-Devil, and darling little Lil’ Zabu.

Why he’s just a cub!

Hey, is Ka-Zar quoting Star Wars, or is that just a coincidence? Normally, I’d guess a coincidence, but given the dumb movie quote Jeph Loeb’s got coming up this issue, I can’t be sure.

When a big, tough guy dressed in animal skins and carrying a huge spear asks if Magneto and pals are okay and who are they anyway, Magneto makes the most evil expression he can and says “We come in peace…”

This is a story that Ka-Zar and Shanna, who are now grown-ups and in color, were telling the Ultimates. They plan to join them in their plans of kicking Magneto’s ass since, over the years, Magneto and his fellow evil mutants have slaughtered over half of K.Z.’s tribe, including his parents.

“Kazar. There’s more than just you and Shanna, right?” Valkyrie asks. “I mean, we need help, bit time.”

“Big time, Valkyrie says, and we see another dude with a torch, and a bunch of silhouettes in the background, indicating a crowd of guys with spears.

Back at the mansion, Iron Man, or the robot posing as him, holds Wasp by the throat and is talking about how the new world order will be better than the old world order, and, well, this:

Ugh. Did Jeph Loeb actually have a character un-ironically quote Terminator? In a story that’s about an evil robot?
Yes, yes he did.

Jesus.

And what’s worse, just as “Captain America” is leading Wasp away from the scene, lightning starts shooting out of his eyes and mouth, he shouts “SKEEEETTT” and Hank Pym, dressed in his Ant-Man costume and riding on a big, fat flying ant, flies out of “Cap”’s open mouth.

The character we thought was Captain America for three panels was actually a robot disguised as a human. Jeph Loeb had a robot-disguised-as-a-human un-ironically quote Terminator.

He melts into a puddle of green, viscous liquid because whatever.

“I need you to shrink down to wasp size and come with me,” Hank says to Wasp. “There’s a conspiracy -- it’s everywhere…”

Back in the Savage Land, Hawkeye is picking off Multiple Man’s multiple men, when Sabretooth jumps at him and shouts “I’m gonna rip your head clean off!”

It’s no “It’s clobberin’ time!” but then, Sabretooth is no Ben Grimm.

That’s when another genuinely cool, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-I-actually-thought-this-was-neat moment occurs—Ka-Zar’s sabretoothed tigers leap on Sabretooth and bury their claws and fangs into him. Sabretooth! Killed by sabretooths! That’s ironic!

(Well, I guess he actually survives, as Hawkeye "finishes him off" next issue, and I saw him ripping off Angel’s wings or something gross in last week’s Ultimatum #4, but as far as Ultimates 3 goes, this is pretty much the last we see of Sabretooth).

The only way this scene would have been cooler? If it was only one tiger—come on Zabu, you could have taken that punk solo—and if instead of Hawkeye getting saved, it was Captain America. And he replied, “You suck on that.”

Okay, maybe not cooler. But funnier!

(By the way, I should point out that as poor a comic book artist as Joe Madureira is, he’s much better suited to Loeb’s cartoonish ultraviolence than David Finch, the guy who’s drawing Ultimatum. This is probably because Madureira is a more cartoonish artists, and doesn’t do that ugly, little line-filled “realistic” style that Finch does. I mean, here we have two-thirds of a page devoted to two big tigers plunging claws and fants into a dude, and there’s not a speck of blood, no limbs flying off or exposed bones are intestines or anything. It’s extreme violence, but it’s relatively tasteful; Madureira apparently draws the split-second where the teeth and claws go in, rather than the split-second where the gushers of blood and shower of torn flesh would come out and off).

Meanwhile, stealthy, tracking-types with heightened senses Wolverine and “The Black Panther” are running through the Savage Land, when Ultimate Juggernaut, now the size of a small house, with hands a few feet wide, sneaks up on them and punches the shit out of them.

“@#$%!” Wolverine says, “The @#$%ing Juggernaut!?”

Ha ha ha ha ha! Like in that one Internet comedy video from many years ago!

The Juggernaut raises his fists to smash Black Panther and, is this the end of the mysterious Black Panther whose identity we don’t know but whose costume has been torn to reveal white skin beneath. White? Oh my God, what is his secret?!

We’ll have to wait until next issue to find out!

Elsewhere, Valkyrie is flying around on her pegasus, when a spurt of flame makes him say “REEEEEE” and throws her off. She wakes up in a messy bedroom, wearing her old “costume,” which was just a half-dozen pie tins, while an unseen landlord knocks on the door and asks for the rent.

She’s experiencing her “own private hell,” the mind-controlling Mastermind says. Late rent? A messy bedroom? Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And since this comics series just hasn’t been gross enough so far, we get this delightful scene:
Meanwhile Thor, Shanna and a bunch of random guys with spears are fighting an army of Multiple Man. Why did the rest of the Ultimates split-up Scooby-Doo style? I don’t know.

This brings us to the scene that Unus the Untouchable fans have been waiting for! Ultimate Unus the Untouchable vs. Ultimate Thor!

Sadly, he never refers to himself as “Unus the Untouchable.” He just stands in front of a rock wall and says, “This place is untouchable” while Thor’s hammer hits a force field in front of him.

“You stand against a god, Unus,” Thor says, and then he raises his hammer and, in the next panel, we get a close-up look at his face, which is contorted into the very angry Madureira expression, blood splatters all over him from off-panel and he says in a special yellow-colored dialogue bubble that Unus is but a mortal, “a thing of mere flesh and blood!”

The implication is that Thor totally smashed Unus the Untouchable with his hammer, but in the very next panel, Thor and his hammer are completely blood-free, and there’s no dead body anywhere. (Or maybe that’s Unus in the far right of the panel? There are some dark, grey shapes being flung around, and I assume they’re Multiple Man duplicates, but its unclear).

Anyway, Magneto strolls up and he and Thor exchange generic dialogue, while Magneto uses his power to drag Mjolnir down through the ground, with Thor still hanging on to it, being towed along with it.

Back in New York, in a subbasement ten stories below the mansion, Ant-Man and Wasp watch through a ventilation grate, as an unseen person puts the Iron Man robot back together, and talks about how the robots are so closely patterned after the Ultimates that their personalities assert themselves strongly (that’s why the Captain America robot tried to save Wasp from the Iron Man robot).

Then we get the dramatic last page splash!

“Hank!” Wasp says “He sounds just like you.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Ant-Man replies, “He’s our son…!”

And on the last page, we see that the figure is Yellowjacket! Wearing a costume almost identical to the one that Marvel Universe Hank Pym wore when he was going by the name Yellowjacket, only with smaller shoulder pad wings and without the yellow bug symbol on the chest.

This Yellowjacket is surrounded by four others, the Iron Man, an Ultimate Thor that actually looks like Brian Hitch’s Ultimate Thor (Shorter hair and beard, slimmer build, the big half-axe Mjolnir), an Ultimate Hulk, and an Ultimate Captain America who’s wearing the uniform from World War II.

Here’s the dramatic monologue: “They think of us as toasters -- --alarm clocks -- --and vibrators. But when the war between man and mutant is settled-- --and most of the human population is dead, only then will they realize-- --the MACHINES have already won.”

Holy shit, a machine whose all “Rah rah robots rule!” that Hank Pym says is his son! Who is this mysterious new villain?! If you’ve ever read an Avengers comic, you probably already know. If not, you’ll have to wait until the next issue to find out.

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Tomorrow night: This is it! The ultimate issue of Ultimates 3! Who will live? Who will die? Who will utter the worst dialogue? Can a human being write over 10,000 words about Ultimates 3 in just five days and still retain their sanity?! Find out tomorrow night!

Ultimates 3 #3

Previously in Ultimates 3: Hawkeye fought Spider-Man in Central Park for seven pages and then stopped, Hank Pym is unconscious at Ultimates Mansion having consumed an unknown quantity of unknown pills, Quicksilver brought his murdered sister Scarlet Witch’s body back to base, Magneto and his mutant terrorist organization The Brotherhood attacked in order to recover the body of his daughter Scarlet Witch, Sabretooth told Captain America to suck it, Wasp begins to think all of the team’s recent misfortunes might be connected, Quicksilver evacuates the Brotherhood at super-speed and absconds with his sister’s body, and then Wolverine shows up and threatens everybody for no reason. (You can read the 2,000-word version here).

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Welcome to Ultimates 3 #3! This issue has my favorite cover so far: Naked Wolverine having the bottom half of his body chomped by a Tyrannosaur. I wouldn’t mind having a huge version of that in a really nice frame over my mantle. The variant cover is by Frank Cho, and it makes Scarlet Witch’s costume look extremely uncomfortable. My nipples and nether region hurt just looking at it. (What, too much information?)

According to the confounding dateline captions, this issue opens at the Tony Stark’s mansion, which is still located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it takes place “last night.” You’ll recall the second issue ended “two seconds ago.” I think the narrative is actually traveling back n time…? Perhaps that’s why there’s a dinosaur on the cover? I guess we’ll find out soon.

So, the previous issue ended with Wolverine popping his claws with a SNIKT and telling the Ultimates they have a bigger problem. It turns out he was threatening them with violence after all, he was just saying hello.

Here he scowls and raises his claws, summarizing the events of the last two issues.

“And before her body is even cold, The Brotherhood-- led by Magneto himself--conveniently shows up here, hands you your collective asses and makes off with the evidence… And none of you want to ask why?”

Er, I know this is nitpicking, but they all have their own individual asses. A collective ass would surely be singular, right? A bigger concern is that everything that Wolverine described happening, from the shooting through Magneto’s attack, happened in within fifteen minutes. News travels fast I guess; fast enough for Magneto and the Brotherhood to have heard about it and arrived to attack, and for Wolverine to have heard about it and dropped by. Maybe they were all in the neighborhood.

(Is it worth noting that Joe Madureira seems to be drawing Marvel Universe Wolverine, rather than Ultimate Universe Wolverine? The Ultimate version had long, more human hair than the weird mane/hair helmet of the original, and had a stupid little soul patch. Maybe later artists on Ultimate X-Men started drawing Ultimate Wolvie more like Original Recipe Wolvie, but there will be some scenes set around the time of the first few issues of Ultimate X-Men later in which Wolverine is sans soul-patch and looks like the stocky little monster troll of the Marvel Universe, instead of the younger, sexier Ultimate version.)

Wolvie says Pietro/Quicksilver called his father Magneto, but Hawkeye disagrees:
Wow, that’s pretty mean, Wolverine.

How does Hawkeye react to Wolverine flippantly bringing up the murder of his family?

By shooting Wolverine five times in a two-page spread, shouting, “That is, mutie, you wanna go, let’s go!”

Wolverine doesn’t like being called “mutie,” as that is apparently a very bad slur to call a mutant, maybe the mutant equivalent of the K-word for Jewish folks or the N-word for black folks?

His eyes turn red, and he shouts “ ‘MUTIE’!?! Oh, I’m gonna DIG this, Barton,” while cutting off half of Hawkeye’s stupid mask.

He retracts his claws when Hawkeye says “I’m better off dead anyway.”



This brings me to one of the parts of the series I genuinely thought was kind of cool, along with the KARAKKAKATHOOM sound effect for Thor in the first issue, and the fact that artist Madureira actually drew Sabretooth with outsized teeth on the cover of the second issue, thus justifying his name…a little (I never understood why Sabretooth was called Sabretooth, since he just had slightly pointy teeth and fought with his fingernails anyway).
So look, neat swearing!

Yeah, it’s still that childish “I’d like to say ‘fuck,’ but since this comic actually kinda sorta for kids even though we say comics aren’t for kids and its full of incest and violence anyway, we have to use four symbols to stand in for the F, the U, the C and the K, even though anyone who’s ever heard a swear word before can deduce from the context that we mean ‘fuck” stuff, these are at least some creative symbols. Kinda like Bettle Bailey swearing, when Whover Draws That Series Know draws little storm clouds and skulls into Sarge’s swearing. Here, the F-word contains a tornado, a radioactive symbol and a skull and cross bones. That’s kinda neat.

Thor doesn’t think so though. He’s had “ENOUGH!” of this shit, and will brook no further fighting amongst the Ultimates.

Wolverine huffs and puffs a bit more about “Pietro and Wanda Lensherr” (shit, I thought there last name was Maximoff? Maybe it’s different in the Ultimate Universe?). When Wasp is all like, “Er, not that we aren’t glad you’re here to help boost sales, why do you give a shit?”

Wolverine explains that, “We’re not talking about just any girl here. We’re talking about Magneto’s daughter. And she could’ve been mine.”

What’s that? Perhaps a Wolverine-narrated flashback will help explain!

It’s “after the war”—I’m guessing the Gulf War—and he’s wandering through the Balkan Mountains in the harsh winter, looking for Wundagore, which means something if you’re familiar with the Marvel Universe (Has Wundagore appeared in any Ultimate books?). He collapses—healing factor on the fritz?—and is found by Magda, Wanda and Pietro’s mother.

See, Wolverine was looking for the Witch of Wundagore, hoping she could help him end his immortal life. Instead, he finds himself naked in her bed, with her standing naked in front of the fire. And then they totally do it. In silhouette, of course, because remember, this is for teenage boys, because what other audience wants to read about Wolverine fucking Scarlet Witch’s mom, but also can’t be permitted to see actual nudity?

(There’s a close-up scan. I didn’t scan it myself, but just found it when google image-ing to see if I could find a scan of the two-page spreads. It’s from a review of this very issue by James Hunt, which you can find here. It’s well worth a read, as Hunt seems to have noticed a whole bunch of little continuity glitches I didn’t, like the number of Hawkeye’s dead children, and the state of Wolverine’s memory during the flashbacks. The Ultimate Universe was only about seven years old at the point this book was published; there really wasn’t much continuity for Loeb and his four editors to have to get right).

That’s when Eric Lensherr, who would one day be Magneto, walks in and finds his wife/girlfriend/lover/whatever in bed with a naked Wolverine. Magneto powers up and then throws a big cauldron at Wolverine, throwing him naked down the mountain.

“I’d been cast down out of heaven…” he says, “…Only to learn that I could not find Wundagore ever again.”

Flash forward to The Savage Land, when Wolverine was working for Magneto (as seen in the first arc of Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men). Wolvie recognizes Scarlet Witch as Magda’s daughter.

Magneto orders Wolverine to track Wanda and Pietro when they go exploring in the jungle, and kill Pietro.

Pietro clasps his sister’s hand and tells her she looks more like their mother every day (Ew), and Wolverine says he “wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t…interrupted.” (Ew). He sticks his claws in Pietro’s chest (although he narrates that he wasn’t trying to actually kill him, just spook him enough to get him to leave his father), but then TWO-PAGE SPLASH!
Wanda glows pink and the background fills with glowing eyed dinosaurs. Apparently, it was Wanda who filled the Savage Land with dinosaurs, as she was able to bend time in space and rearrange reality; Magneto simply took credit for it. A T-Rex chases Wolverine away.

Once they think they’re alone, well, I guess they start doing it, and Wolverine watches…
So yeah, ew.

Wasp splits up the team, sending half after Magneto in the Savage Land, and keeping the rest with her. Thor, Valkyrie, Wolverine and The Black Panther are the Savage Land team, and when Wasp sees BP, she asks where he’s been and where Captain America is. He doesn’t answer, and Wolverine takes one look at the Panther and asks incredulously if “that’s the Black Panther.” Oh my God, have you figured out his secret yet?

If not, a few pages later, Wolverine let’s the Panther know he knows his identity and he can’t figure out why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Back in New York, Iron Man tells The Wasp he examined the crime scene and discovered that the bullet used to kill Scarlet Witch was a D.N.A.-specific one and was manufactured by Stark Industries. And then he removes his faceplate to reveal…a robot face underneath? And then he hits Wasp with a bolt of electricity!

The Ultimates’ transport lands safely in the Savage Land—hey, I thought people always crash-landed when they visited the Savage Land?—and meet Wolverine’s contacts there, who get introduced in a last-page splash.


There are two admittedly rather cool looking sabretooth tigers, and posed between them are two mostly naked figures.

“I’m Shanna and this is my boyfriend Ka-Zar,” the female says. Sweet, it’s Ultimate Shanna the She-Devil and Ultimate Ka-Zar! And, while it doesn’t say so, I assume the sabretooth he’s leaning on is Ultimate Zabu. How does he differ from "616" Zabu? He's striped. Bad-ass.

And that’s the third issue. We’ve passed the halfway mark!

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Tomorrow night: The Ultimates vs. The Brotherhood! Another genuinely cool scene! An attempted rape scene, demonstrating that this is all very serious and adult! And Ultimate Unus the Untouchable! And don’t forget to come back in a few hours for this week’s Weekly Haul

Ultimates 3 #2

Previously in Ultimates 3: A leaked sex-tape of Tony “Iron Man” Stark and Natasha “The Black Widow” Romanova was leaked to the media and aired un-edited on ABC and CNN, Venom attacked The Ultimates’ mansion headquarters and was ultimately melted by Thor, The Wasp revealed to Captain America that brother and sister Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are indeed fucking, Wasp then discovered that Hank “Giant Man”/“Ant-Man” Pym was either dead or unconscious from having taken a bunch of pills, and someone killed The Scarlet Witch using some sort of special Quicksilver-dodging, Scarlet Witch-seeking mini-missile. (Much more detail here).

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The second issue of Ultimates 3 is much better than the first, which probably isn’t saying too much, considering that it wouldn’t have been possible for it to be any worse. Still, as I sat down to write-up my synopsis of and thoughts on this issue, I realized I had hardly scanned any images from it, so there were relatively few “Oh my God you need to see this to believe it!” type of scenes.

Perhaps that’s because this second issue is pretty much all fighting? And while the dialogue is unbelievably bad and the action uninspired, pointless and occasionally incompetently conveyed, it’s at least better than all the attempts to advance a plot that occurred in the previous issue.

As in the previous issue though, Jeph Loeb displays an disturbing lack of understanding of either the way linear and non-linear narratives work or what it’s like to live in the fourth dimension. Perhaps a combination of the two?

The first panel of the first issue opened with a caption informing us that the very first scene of the comic was occurring “last night,” while the rest of it occurred “today.”

The first panel of this second issue opens with a caption reading “Twenty-two minutes ago.”

So, the first scene of this book occurs “twenty-two minutes ago.” Got that? You probably assume that means that it takes place twenty-two minutes before the last panel, the dramatic full-page splash at the end of the first issue, in which Dr. Blake declares Scarlet Witch dead.

But no, that’s not the case. A few panels later, we see a couple of New York police officers getting a call over their scanner about the shooting, so this is happening around the same time as the previous scene, not actually twenty-two minutes before it.

Later scenes in the book also use weird captions to designate the time as being in the recent past. For example, the next one we see is “seven minutes ago,” and finally “two seconds ago.”

The best I can come up with to explain this is that Loeb saw another comic book where it was used right, thought it was cool without really understanding it, and tried to replicate it here. How would it be used right? Well, I imagine if a comic started in medias res, with some crazy situation, like Superman leading an army of Kryptonian centaurs who are about to execute the members of the Justice League. Then the next page might say “22 minutes ago,” and the rest of the book would slowly unfold how we got from the strange “now” situation.

But Ultimates 3 #2 doesn’t do that. Like the first issue, it is a perfectly linear narrative, with one scene leading chronologically to the next, with noting but the little dateline captions saying otherwise.

The lesson? If you’re reading a Jeph Loeb comic, never read any of the captions. Trust me, they’re much better that way. It’s really the only way to read Superman/Batman, in which the two characters narrate the exact same events in every single panel, deviating only to let the reader know in no uncertain terms that they are actually madly in love with one another but are too afraid to just come out and say it, because what would Lois and/or Robin think?

Okay, so we know the when is “twenty-two minutes ago,” whatever on earth that means. The where is Central Park’s southwest entrance. (Just in case you want to take an Ultimates 3 tour of the city at some point).

There we see Spider-Man, that is, Ultimate Spider-Man swinging around on a web line, narrating out loud to himself like Stan Lee was still writing the poor sap: “Bad enough I went out this morning to school without a jacket… …whe knew I was going to need thermal underwear?”

Indeed. When he over hears the police scanner saying a woman was shot in the vicinity of Radio City Music Hall, he jumps on top of a police car and shouts “Oh, No! Aunt May said she was going to see the Christmas show at Radio City…”

All of a sudden, a BLAM rings out, and Spidey is down, a tranquilizer dart in his shoulder. What could this mean?

It means we need a double-page splash panel, showing Hawkeye jumping at Spider-Man and firing more darts, saying, “You should’ve stayed down, kid!”

Here’s what the spread looks like, without the dialogue and sound effects added:
(You know, if the whole book was free of dialogue, it might have been a much better read. It certainly wouldn't have made any less sense, and every reader could imagine their own dialogue, which would be better than what Loeb came up with.)

Why has Hawkeye ambushed Spidey? As he told Captain America and Wasp last issue, after their chat about the Maximoffs incestuous relationship, that he was going to track down Spider-Man to see what he knew about Venom attacking the mansion.

He is apparently planning to literally shoot first and ask questions later.

Their fight lasts three more pages, with Hawkeye saying things like, “Maybe I have gone a little crazy. Maybe every time I hear a gunshot it takes me right back to when my family…” and Spidey saying thngs like “How’ bout you go cry your eyes out on Oprah…” and “Eat web, cowboy!”

Before long, the dart takes effect, and Spidey is down for the count, with Hawkeye pressing a gun to his head and threatening to kill him if he finds out that Spidey had something to do with Venom attacking. Apparently he’s not going to just shoot first and ask questions later; he’s just going to shoot, and then threaten to shoot.

Suddenl, a shield dramatically KLANKs the gun out of Hawkeye’s hand, and Captain America says the deranged purple enthusiast must return to base with him “A.S.A.P., priority one.”

The pair leave Spidey laying in the snow, still paralyzed from the dart. That is the last we’ll see of or hear from Spider-Man for the rest of the series. The first third of this issue? Completely irrelevant. (Well, it did give Joe Madureira a chance to draw Spider-Man, which I imagine is why it was included at all).

Suddenly, it’s “seven minutes ago.” Seven minutes before the last twenty-two minutes ago? Or 15 minutes later? Damn, I forgot I’m not suppose
d to bother with captions.

Whenever it is, the place is the Ultimates mansion. Hank Pym is alive after all, as he’s lying in a hospital-style bed, a tube in his nostrils, and Wasp at his bedside pleading with him to regain conscious and tell him what pills he took, as “there were dozens.”

That’s when Pietro VOOOOSHes in with Wanda’s body, and starts explaining what happened in super-speed.

I was going to point out how ridiculous it is that Pietro was expecting his radio signals to reach Wasp and for her and/or the Ultimates respond in the space of a few split-seconds, but let’s be generous to Loeb and assume Pietro’s in shock over his sister’s death, and he’s forgetting he’s the only one who has super-speed.
Wait, Wasp is saying she didn’t get any message…? So she’s assuming she should have received it as well…?

Fuck, I can’t make sense of this stuff. Four editors! They could have drawn straws, and who ever had the short one would have to call Loeb and be like, “Hey, this scene on page eight and nine? What the hell’s going on here man?”

Suddenly the power goes out! The door is blown open! And five villains pose in a full-page splash panel, little pink-ish boxes identifying them.

Mystique! Sabretooth! Blob! Madrox! And Lorelei! I remember the first four from various Ultimate X-Men stories (well, I think Mystique was just the name of Professor X’s cat during Mark Millar’s run on the title, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of the later UXM writers introduced her in this form). As for Lorelei, I don’t remember seeing her in an Ultimate Universe story, nor a Marvel Universe story, but her name and power are pretty self-explanatory; she seems to function like The Enchantress, and she fights Thor in a few moments.

Drunken Tony Stark is struggling to put on his armor when Natasha appears in his room, but Wasp “stings” her somewhere inside her head, revealing her to be the shape-changed Mystique.

Thor and Valkyrie had been cuddling in bed, and Thor explained why he started talking like Marvel Universe Thor.

“For the year past I struggled to prove my identity to the people of Midgard,” he says, “Now, I have no such conflict.”

So you see, he was trying to prove he was really Thor by talking like everyone else, and now that everyone knows he’s Thor, he can talk like Thor. Yeah, I don’t understand that explanation either. But who cares, for no sooner does Valkyrie get her Red Sonja-style chain mail bikini top on then Lorelei appears and tells Thor to kill Valkyrie in a special font, his eyes start glowing, and he attacks her.

Blog, meanwhile, attacks the Ultimates’ refrigerator, and when Wasp confronts him, letting us know that she’s struggled with bulimia for years (Hey, a relevant issue! So tastefully addressed!), Blob responds, “Wasp! Gonna eat you up!” Iron Man saves her this time, but Blob apparently gets his wish in Loeb’s series Ultimatum (Click here to see a gross panel of Blob eating Wasp. Or at least part of her).

Elsewhere, Cap is asking Hawkeye to save at least one Multiple Man to interrogate, when Sabretooth attacks Cap from behind, his claws raking against his back and summoning a splash of red blood. In the next panel, we see Capt’s wound-less back…his costume’s not even torn, and he hits Sabretooth with his shield, saying “I want you out of this house, Creed.”

This leads to what may be the most representative panel of the whole series. This, by the way, is a full-page splash:
Oh man. I’m not sure how comics writers get paid these days, but does Jeph Loeb get a page rate? Like, doe she get $30 or $100 bucks or $250 for each page worth of script he writes? Whatever the amount, I kind of hope he does.

Because I really like the idea of him giggling to himself and simply typing the words “Suck it” on a page worth of script and thinking, “There, that’s $50 (or however much) Quesada owes me.”

Or did Loeb and Madureira use the old Marvel method when creating this, wherein Loeb gave Madureira a basic plot outline to break down and drawn, and then he returned to dialogue based on the final art? Like, did Loeb give Madureira a synopsis for this scene saying “Sabretooth and Captain America fight,” and Madureira just decided to draw a huge, one-page image to cut down on the work? And Loeb had no choice but to insert a single line of stupid dialogue.

I want to know how this page came to be. I am honestly fascinated that this was published in a Marvel comic book, that Marvel paid professionals to write, draw, color, letter and edit this page, and then they charged people money to buy a comic book containing it.

That is 1/22nd of this issue. If you bought this comic book, you paid 13 cents for this image.

The fight continues for three more panels, while in the infirmary Quicksilver is ignoring the battle, and staring intently at his sister’s dead body. Is he waiting for his father to show up, as he knows he will, or is he imagining what sexual act could be even more edgy than incest, now that his sister is dead?

No sickos, he was waiting for his father, who he knew was there the minute the lights went out, he says.

Magneto and Quicksilver exchange a few words, and when Magneto asks who his estranged son thinks will have a better chance of solving his sister’s murder, Quicksilver grabs all the Brotherhood villains and disappears—with Magneto and his sister’s body.

As Wasp explains what just happened to Hawkeye and Cap, a dialogue bubble spoken from someone off-panel gets their attention: “I know you think you’ve got a murder to solve, but, believe me—“

And then it’s time for another full-page splash! This one features Wolverine, wearing a belt full of pouches around his right thigh, and dramatically popping his claws, while saying finishing his dramatic entrance line: “--You’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands!”

This image, by the way, is the one that takes place “two seconds ago.”

And thus concludes Ultimates 3 #2.

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Tomorrow: Hey, it’s Wednesday tomorrow, and there will be new comics to read. Will Ultimates 3 week pre-empt the usual Wednesday night Weekly Haul feature? No, no it will not. I should have two posts tomorrow. First, we’ll examine Ultimates 3 #3, the issue containing two gross sex scenes, and then I’ll have the usual reviews of the week’s new books that I’ll read. See you then! Well, I won’t actually see you, I guess…unless you have live webcams and stream yourself reading my blog…but you know what I mean.

Ultimates 3 #1

This is the very first page of Ultimates 3 #1, and things go very wrong immediately:
The very first part of the book, the dateline box in the upper left corner of the very first panel is pointless and confusing, setting the tone for the next 100 pages or so.

The place is Tony Stark’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, and the time is “last night.” What does that mean, “Last night?” The night before when? Right now? When you’re reading it? This isn’t a flashback, it’s the very first panel. You can’t start with a flashback; you have to be at a point in time ahead of the flashback in order to flash back to something.

I suppose a story could start “last night” if it were to jump around in time, but this one doesn’t. Rather than moving from last night to today and back and forth, it simply starts last night, then progresses to today, and remains in today, without ever going back to last night.

So, despite the caption, this scene is actually taking place now, and the scenes later in the book will also be taking place now, although at a time in the future of when this scene is taking place, because that’s the way time works. The default mode for a comic book (or novel or movie or TV show or play) is to progress through time in a linear fashion, and if that is to be deviated from, then there should be some indication of the deviation.

The presence of this dateline is, frankly, completely insane, and we haven’t even finished the first panel yet.

According to the title page in the hardcover trade, this miniseries had three assistant editors plus an editor. That’s at least four people who could have at least tried to stop this book from existing. They are all complicit.

The Ultimates—Hawkeye, Black Panther, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, The Wasp and Tony “Iron Man” Stark—are having a meeting, which so far consists of watching a sex tape of Stark and his former lover, The Black Widow (a former member of the team that betrayed them in Ultimates 2).

It’s not just all over the Internet, but it’s also on CNN and ABC The Wasp says, “NBC at least had the decency to blur out the more graphic parts.”

That’s right, both CNN and ABC are showing an unedited sex tape. They are actually airing hardcore pornography. This information is included in the second panel of the first page. Already Loeb’s Ultimates has become completely disconnected from reality. (Fun fact: Loeb has worked as a producer for several television shows, so should be in a better position to know that ABC airing an unedited sex tape—with close-ups!—is even less realistic than a room full of super-powered mutants having drinks served to them by robots.

Also of note in this panel is that much of the background from panel two is repeated in panel four, with only image on the screen and the characters in different positions. There’s nothing wrong with an artist taking the occasional shortcut, of course, but this particular shortcut draws attention to itself as a shortcut, since despite the fact that some of the characters have moved, the robot servants remained rooted to the spot. Get to work you lazy robots!

Turn the page and hey, it’s time for a two-page splash panel already.

Thor comes flying through the room, saying "NNNGGNN," apparently thrown or punched through the wall by Venom, who is in the process of climbing through a hole in the wall, seven-foot-long serrated tongue first.

“Where is she?” he shouts in his own special Venom font (white letters on black bubbles, Morpheus-style). “Tell me where she is or I’ll KILL every last one of you!”

“Nice. And now a word from our sponsor…” Hawkeye says, his pistols drawn. This is actually the most clever bit of dialogue any character utters in the course of a fight scene throughout the entire series. You may not believe me, but just you wait.

This page also introduces the characters, with a little red-ish/orange-ish/coral-ish box appearing next to each of the Ultimates bearing their names. Along the bottom of the spread is the name of this story, “Sex, Lies and DVD,” followed by “The Ultimates 3.1: Improbably Cause.”

Hey, wait a minute… No, none of the other issues have a title.

Is “Sex, Lies and DVD” the name of the story arc, not the individual chapter? If that’s the case, I wonder why they changed the name of the trade to the more spoiler-iffic “Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?” Other than the fact that it’s a less dumb name than “Sex, Lies and DVD,” of course, which has very little to do with the story, and is a reference to the title of a 1989 independent movie. (This was the first time while reading the story that I would wonder who the intended audience is. It would not be the last).

Next up is page four, which may just be the worst-designed page in comic book history:

Man, just look at that thing. (Seriously. Look at it. Click on it to make it bigger; same as the rest of the images). Madureira has the characters breaking the frames of the panels because it’s exciting looking, a trick he learned from reading manga. He apparently didn’t digest the manga very well though, as this isn’t exactly how you do it.

Hawkeye running straight out of the first panel? That’s pretty awesome, really. He’s such an action hero that he just ran right out of the comic! But then the next panel, butted right up against it, ruins the effect, and it looks like Hawkeye might be running past a little Venom, or something?

This is just a terrible, terrible page. It took me seconds to figure out what order to read the dialogue and images in which, okay, is just seconds, but that’s an awful lot of time to spend trying to figure out how to read something that should be completely intuitive.

While I was reading this, I was reminded of those little “how to read” features you often see in the beginning of manga collections, which are there to inform kids reading their first non-flipped manga reading a comic right to left instead of left to right might work.

Here’s one from The Big Adventures of Majokao Vol. 1, an Udon Entertainment kids manga suggested for ages seven and up:

You really need some kind of chart like that to read this page, but the arrows on it would be pretty erratic, and would have to circle around whole figures here and there.

Man, this page…Madureira got paid money to draw it. And Marvel published it. And then they asked people to give them money to read a comic containing it. My God.

And hey, we’re only four pages in!

As for what exactly’s happening on the page, even after spending all this time on it, the final panel is a little unclear to me. I’m guessing Venom shoots some kind of goo darts out of his body at Hawkeye?

It may be worth noting that this Venom appears to be the Marvel Universe or “616” version of the character, not the Ultimate Venom that had previously appeared in a few story arcs in Ultimate Spider-Man. That discrepancy will eventually be explained though.

Next The Wasp and the silent Black Panther join the fray, but they are no match for Venom. Hawkeye attacks again, and we get some just sterling dialogue.

Hawkeye: “Wasp. Go! I’ll deal with butt-ugly.”

Venom: “Eat. This.”

Time for another two-page splash panel! Ultimate Valkyrie dives off the back of a black Pegasus, a broadsword bearing vaguely Nordic ruins drawn back behind her head, shouting “Nobody hits my thunder god!” (Remember, Venom threw Thor through a wall five pages ago).

I remember this image getting a lot of attention and commentary when this comic was first released, so I’ll post the relevant portion here:

Guess what it was that was so widely commented on? Yeah, you can see the outline of Valkyrie’s nipples through her top.

That’s actually a pretty good thing; in fact, it’s one of the two or three times during this entire story where I sort of admired something the creators had done.

See, when people where super-tight clothes, so tight you can see every single muscle straining against them? You really ought to be able to see their nipples. But you never, ever, ever seen women’s nipples in comics. Why is that? Because DC and Marvel basically suck, is why.

Horrible violence, even horrible sexual violence is A-OK in their books, even (in DC’s case) Comics Code Authority-approved books or those that don’t need a “mature readers” stamp of some sort, but the outline of a nipple through clothing? Saints preserve us!

Like so many writers’ difficult relationship with swearing in super-comics, the hang-up with sexual content, which I’m defining extremely broadly to include the admission that breasts may in fact have nipples—just contributes to the immaturity and juvenility of the comics.

There’s an admission that certain parts of the human body are naughty and are, in fact, so naughty that they must not be included in any story, whereas no act of violence is considered beyond the pale (in the very next panel, Valkyrie’s sword plunges through Venom’s shoulder and halfway down his torso, a bright read gusher of blood emanating from the top of the wound).

Are comics really for grown-ups? Is this really an adult comic? Then go ahead and show some naked people you big babies; otherwise just admit this is stuff for teenage boys and quit trying to convince us all how mature you are.

This panel is, unfortunately, the last time the existence of nipples will be hinted at in the rest of Ultimates 3 (Perhaps Marvel got gun shy after the first issue?) There will be several other sex scenes, many of them gross, but no actually nudity.

Anyway, back to the violence: Despite a gaping chest wound that spurts blood all over Valkyrie’s face, Venom grabs her sword and raises it to strike her—“You’re a very silly girl-- --who’ll look much sillier without a head!”—when all of a sudden “KARAKKAKATHOOM” Thor re-enters the fray.

Yes, KARAKKAKATHOOM, with the THOOM being about four times larger than the k’s, a’s and r’s. This is another one of the admirable points in the series.

Thor’s lighting is enough to melt Venom into a very large sticky black puddle, and he and Valkyrie embrace. Thor is talking in the faux Shakespearean sort of dialogue that Stan Lee used to write for him, which Millar’s Thor never did. Will this be significant? No, not really. It’s just an example of something about the series that’s changed to make it more like the Marvel Universe.

Also of note, the dialogue is always in all-caps now. In the first two volumes, all of the dialogue was written with upper and lower-case letters, just like non-comic book writing. That was something that was rather unusual and noteworthy about the original Ultimate comics.

Why the change? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like it could be accidental. In the Superman/Batman story arc Loeb wrote that I mentioned yesterday, the one where the heroes encountered analogues of the Ultimates, Loeb had the Ultimate analogues’ dialogue appear in both capitals and lower-case letters, while Superman, Batman and everyone from their dimension spoke in standard all-caps).

Hawkeye, who happens to be pretty insane, starts shooting at the puddle of Venom, to make sure it’s dead. Wasp tells him to holster his weapon, calling him Clint, and she puts his gun in her face and says, “You call me that name in public one more time and I’ll drop you right here in the street.”

Yes, Clint “Hawkeye” Barton would rather publicly murder his teammate than have his real name spoken aloud in public. Hawkeye wouldn’t last one second on Brad Meltzer’s Justice League.

On the next page we see an exterior shot of the team’s building, with robots repairing the hole that Venom and Thor made. There is a box there that says “Today.”

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who sat out the whole fight with Venom, are leaving to go Christmas shopping, when Captain America, who also missed out on the Venom fight (or did he?), stops them to ask the Witch to maybe not go out in public wearing just a loin cloth and spandex bustier.

When Cap touches her arm and says “Be reasonable, Wanda…” Quicksilver pulls Cap’s hand away and says, “You come near my sister again and I’ll kill you.”

This team is so extreme that they don’t just argue and threaten one another with physical violence, they literally threaten one another with death over disagreements.

Then comes another notorious page:

In the Marvel Universe, it’s always been my understanding that Pietro “Quicksilver” Maximoff was always a little over-protective and kinda weird around his sister, Wanda/The Scarlet Witch. In Ultiamtes, Mark Millar played up that weirdness to the point where one’s meant to think that they’re maybe too affectionate to one another, like maybe there’s some kinda creepy, unspoken sibling lust between them. Loeb tries to one-up Millar with disastrous results in this Look, they are actually, no bones about it, totally fucking each other scene.

While the admission that the Maximoffs were indeed doing it is fucked up enough, Loeb’s handling of it makes it seem even weirder, as The Wasp seems to indicating that there’s nothing that weird or wrong about it, and it’s only Captain America’s “1944 brain” that can’t process anything in the 21st century, like incestuous relationships.

I do like Hawkeye’s last line there, where he seems to be indicating that for the sake of PR, they must put down one of the Maximoffs. I can’t tell if Loeb’s Hawkeye is supposed to be a hilarious parody of a shitty bad-ass superhero or not, but most of the scenes involving Hawkeye strike me as funny. The fact that all of the characters are written as shitty superheroes makes me think that the humor I find in how ridiculous Hawkeye is can’t be anything other than accidental.

With that, Hawkeye takes his leave, announcing that he’s going to look for Black Panther, who hasn’t been seen since the Venom fight, as he’ll need his help tracking down Spider-Man, who might know something about the Venom attack, since that’s his villain.

There’s a tight close-up of Captain America looking intense and not saying anything, at which point I figured out the “secret” about the Black Panther and his relationship with Cap. Have you figured it out yet? No? You will.

Wasp, who used to be Captain America’s lover, is feeling kind of sad that he’s shutting her out, so she goes to a dark room where her abusive ex-husband Hank Pym is hunched over a microscope, and complains about things to him. He doesn’t seem to be listening because—what this?—he’s dead or unconscious or something, drool hardened over his mouth, his eyes open but vacant, and a bottle of pills spilled next to him.

Outside, it’s snowing, and those crazy incest-having heroes the Maximoffs are enjoying the it, despite poor Wanda being dressed in a loin cloth and bustier, with only a long, open fur coat to keep her warm.

Then, suddenly, there’s a full-panel BANG sound effect, and Pietro pushes Wanda down at super-speed and starts chasing the bullet, all the while trying to reach the Wasp via some kind of communication device, and getting angry that she’s not answering him, despite the fact that his few dialogue bubble’s worth of dialogue would have to be spoken so fast that Wasp couldn’t possibly get the message, let alone respond.

The bullet, Pietro discovers while trying to catch it, is apparently a Wanda-seeking bullet, as it dodges him and flies back towards Wanda.

And here, for at least the third time in these first 19 pages, I saw something completely unrealistic, even by superhero comic standards:

Now, I’m no physicist, and I never even made it through the copy of James Kakalios’ The Physics of Super Heroes someone gave me as a Christmas present one year, but if Pietro was moving faster, or even just as fast as the bullet, wouldn’t he have been able to catch it without it piercing his hand?

I’m not basing this on any scientific understanding of velocity or kinetic energy, but on the simple fact that other superhero speedsters in other comics I’ve read are always harmlessly snatching speeding bullets out of the air, by virtue of their speed relative of the bullet making it as if the bullet were simply lying on the ground.

Perhaps Pietro is really, really slow for a speedster, though, and was able to catch-up to the bullet, but then dropped his speed as soon as he wrapped his fist around it, and it therefore tore through his now normal velocity-having hand?

I don’t know exactly, but this seemed all wrong to me.

As Wanda lay dying on the street, a blonde, bespectacled doctor with an oddly carved wooden cane appears. He seems to be Donald Blake, 616 Thor’s one-time human alter-ego, but here he’s just some doctor who looks like Blake; it’s just an Easter egg I guess. He tries CPR, but it’s no use.

“She’s dead,” he says.

And that is Ultimates 3 #1, definitely the worst issue of what is probably the worst comic book ever created.


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Tomorrow night: It gets worse! (Not really. How could it? But it don’t get a whole hell of a lot better, either).

Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?

This summer Marvel Comics is in the process of ending their Ultimate line of comics, with the intention of relaunching the line as Ultimate Comics.

At the moment, the Ultimate Universe is being wound down. Of the three ongoing series, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men have already ended, and Ultimate Spider-Man’s last issue shipped last Wednesday. Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, the six-issue miniseries with a notorious three-year-long hiatus between two of its issues, just wrapped up, and the crossover event comic that’s supposed to serve as an official end of the line, Jeph Loeb and David Finch’s Ultimatum miniseries, is slowly but surely reaching it’s final issue (the fourth issue just shipped last week, and there’s one more left to go).

After that, there’s just a couple of special with the word “Requiem” in the title, and then in August Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man and Ultimate Comics: The Avengers will launch, although whether or not this will be a brand-new start to the Ultimate Universe or simply a re-branded continuation with a couple of new #1’s remains to be seen.

But either way, it will mark an end of sorts of Marvel’s Ultimate experiment.

When the line launched in 2000, the concept was simple enough: Start over for new readers, with modern comic book storytelling techniques, a fresh 21st century aesthetic, and 40-years worth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

While I don’t think anyone at Marvel was ever impolitic enough to say so, the Ultimate line was essentially the opportunity to do Marvel Comic right; excising that which dated the original stories in favor of something fresher, approaching the properties the way Hollywood was just then preparing to approach them (If I’m remembering correctly, the X-Men film had just come out, and Spider-Man was about to).

Without repeating myself too much, I think the Ultimate line worked extremely well at the beginning, with Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar each helming a pair of titles (Ultimate Spider-Man andUltimate Marvel Team-Up for Bendis, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates for Millar).

Unfortunately, the concept couldn’t quite last a decade, for a variety of reasons. Bendis as his collaborators, Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen, did incredibly admirable work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but Millar left both of his titles much more quickly.

Those who followed him on Ultimate X-Men seemed far too intent to introduce too much of the things that made the moribund Marvel X-Men franchise moribund, sucking the specialness out of it. Ultimate Fantastic Four was a mess from the start, with different creative teams every six-to-twelve issues. Too many artists of too many styles and levels of ability were drawing Ultimate books, diluting the brand’s association with quality.

And then Jeph Loeb came, and destroyed the Ultimate Universe.

Well, that was actually his stated goal with Ultimatum, but before Ultimatum #1 even shipped, it seemed Loeb was breaking the line, and probably not on purpose.

Loeb is, of course, a very popular writer whose written some pretty great comics and some pretty terrible ones; a writer who is either smart or lucky enough to have worked with some of the best super-comics artists in the business.

When he attacked the Marvel universe, he was coming off a particularly bad stretch of comics-writing for DC, a time in which he was one of the four writers for the Superman line, and then Superman/Batman and Supergirl. In fact, his last Superman/Batman story arc was about the two title characters fighting barely veiled analogues of Marvel’s Ultimates characters. In retrospect, it almost seems like his “Vengeance” story arc was simply a try-out for a gig writing for Marvel’s Ultimate Universe.

Once there, it was announced that Loeb would be writing the next two volumes of The Ultimates, volume three with the once super-popular deadline-challenged artist Joe Madureira, who had left comics for video games, and volume four with his Superman/Batman collaborator Ed McGunness.

At some point, plans changed, as Ultimates 3 became simply a five-part miniseries (the first two volumes were each 12 issues, with a 13the added to the second volume), and the fourth volume cancelled, as apparently the Ultimate Universe’s days were numbered.

Having just recently read a trade collection of Ultimates 3 that I borrowed from the library (which is really the only safe way to read it), I think it’s clear that, once Marvel published Ultimates 3 #1, they had no choice but to destroy the Ultimate Universe and either scrap the line and start over, or at least re-brand and re-number it in an effort to pretend the story never existed. It is that bad.

In fact, I think it may be the worst comic I have ever read.

I’ve been giving this some thought and, while I can think of some really, really bad comic books, all of them seem to fall short of the extent of Ultimates 3’s badness.

For example, 1993’s Darker Image #1 featured the most appalling, creatively bankrupt story I’ve ever encountered: Rob Liefeld’s “Bloodwulf” short story, which was nothing more than a blatant Lobo rip-off story, more poorly drawn and more poorly written than any Lobo story ever produced. But then, it was just a short story, only a few pages long. It was just a repulsive, soul-destroying black hole of a comics story, but, at the end of the day, it was just one-third of a comic book, and amounted to no more than one more embarrassment in Liefeld’s very embarrassing bibliography.

Or Death’s Head II, did any of you read that? Holy shit was that a terrible thing. But it was an early ‘90s comic book, and was terrible in many of the ways it was stylish to be terrible and, again, it was just a few issues, a blip of abysmal comics.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there’s no excuse to publish comics as terrible as Ultimates 3, certainly not comics that are part of the Ultimate line, which was premised on not being as shitty as the worst Marvel comics.

(Those are the only two comics I can think of that were perhaps worse than Ultimates 3; I’m sure there are many more, but I do try not to read godawful comics, so I don’t have any other candidates. If you have any suggestions for The Worst Comic Ever, please feel free to let me know in the comments).

The environment in which Ultimates 3 was released really accentuates it’s complete lack of quality. It was written by Jeph Loeb at the height of his popularity, wooed away from DC Comics. It was drawn by Joe Madureira who, okay, may not have actually ever been all that great an artist, but if this was enough to bring him back, it must have been pretty special right?

And, of course, it was the follow-up to Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s 25 issue of The Ultimates which, despite it’s sizable and numerous flaws, just may have been the most influential and oft-imitated comic of the decade. Following Millar and Hitch on their signature work was an unenviable task, and looked at from a certain angle, the fact that Loeb and Madureira were chosen to follow the pair makes a certain kind of sense.

If Marvel would have just found a writer capable of writing superheroes as if they were the stars of big, dumb Hollywood movies, and make them a little more edgy than their “616” counterparts (and maybe throw in some pop culture references), and an artist who could do hyper-detailed, photorealistic art, then the new team would likely have just seemed like a watered-down version of Millar and Hitch. Whether they were actually worse, or just as good or even better, the perception would have been that they were paler imitations, simply by virtue of coming second.

So Marvel chose a writer who writes nothing like Millar, and an artist whose style is diametrically opposite of Hitch’s. That I can understand.

Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out very well.

Loeb ditched the attempts at relevance. There were no politics, no pop culture, not even realism; in fact, Ultiamtes 3 is even less realistic than your average Marvel Universe story. He likewise abandoned Millar’s attempts to think of new conflicts, or at least new spins on age-old ones, retreating to old stand-by Marvel villains and plots (And like Ultimate X-Men’s Robert Kirkman, Loeb seemed to be trying to pack in elements from the Marvel Universe version, so in this series we get the same old Ultron and his same old relationship to the Pyms, we get the Yellowjacket costume, and the return of the superhero costumes over ribbed, leather work clothes, the Ultimates aren’t with the government but are back to being freelance superheroes living in a mansion, and so on).

The one aspect of Millar’s Ultimates run that Loeb did keep was the edginess, and he exploded it, trying to out-outrageous Millar, and while he does provide a lot of outrageous stuff (Incest on page 14!), it’s not grounded to anything serious, grown-up or real, and thus comes across as a juvenile attempt to be “mature.” Some aspects of the book read like a 14-year-old’s attempt to write a really cool comic book for the 1993 comics market.

As for Madureira, I haven’t followed his career as closely as I’ve followed Loeb’s, and I honestly don’t know if the work he does here is better or worse than the comics work he’s done before. It’s not very good though. In fact, it’s fairly awful, and there are some pages of this book that must be among the worst lay-outs in comics history.

But if you want the opposite of Hitch, you’ve got it with Madueira. I like his style and character design just fine as static images. He’s probably a pretty good cover or pin-up artist, and he’s certainly an artist I’d love to get sketches from. But he’s not much of a storyteller, and seems completely bewildered with what to do with a comics page, but we’ll get to that later.

See, I know I’m throwing around some pretty sweeping pronouncements here, which is why I want to devote a great deal more attention to Ultimates 3. It is a really, really, really rather bad comic book, but I think it’s a significant one, and so I want to try to back up those sweeping pronouncements.

But so as not to make this post ten million words long, or to bore you to tears (You’re not actually reading every word of this are you? You’re skimming my post right? I’d skim me if I were you; I talk waaaaayyyyyy too much for a blogger, if you ask me), I’m going to divide the series up.

So this week is Ultimates 3 week on Every Day Is Like Wednesday. We’ll be taking a look at one issue of the series each day, from Monday through Friday.

Two more things before we call it a night.

First, the trade collection, published as Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch? (Er, spoiler altert! Someone kills the Scarlet Witch!), opens with a rather curious two paragraph synopsis:

Iron Man.Thor. Captain America. The Wasp. Hawkeye. The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes assembled together to handle situations no other team could. Once kept under the thumb of the United States government, billionaire playboy Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) decided to take the team on t heir own, housing them in his private Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue.

That’s all stuff you’d probably know from reading the first two volumes of the series, and seems like legitimate catch-up, re-cap material. But then there’s this second paragraph:

Joined now by the Black Panther, Valkyrie, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, the team deals with conflicts that are both internal and external. Until six weeks ago, Valkyrie was an ordinary 19-year-old groupie, dreaming of being a super hero, yet she now possesses the powers of a goddess. The ever-silent Black Panther keeps to himself, with the exception of a yet unexplained bond with Captain America.

And that’s just the beginning.

None of that is anything you’d know from reading previous volumes of The Ultimates, and in fact deals with some storytelling issues. Valkyrie and Black Panther are new to the team, appearing as members in this issue with no explanation to their appearance there. Which is, of course, fine; stories often start out in the middle of the action or a new status quo, and then gradually explain things as they unfold. But Ultimates 3 never really gets to that, at least not in any satisfying way, and its inclusion in this prose introduction seems like an admission by the collection itself, a sort of “Oh yeah, you’ll need to know this stuff, because it’s not in any of the comics.”

And finally for tonight, I wanted to show a few examples of how Madureira’s style and design contrasts with Hitch’s. The latter is a far better draftsman, storyteller and “actor” than the former, but I like the former’s style better. At any rate, he’s clearly a very, very different artist, as his takes on the Hitch-designed characters clearly shows.



Here are the two Ultimates artist's versions of Thor. Hitch draws Thor as the biggest, broadest-shouldered, widest-chested of the characters (except for the Hulk), but he's still more or less just a big, strong, pretty cut human being.

Madureira's Thor, meanwhile, is built like a bodybuilder, or, more accurately, a post-1990's superhero or video game character. Are the muscles in his right arm real muscles that would appear on a real human being? I have no idea. Obviously, my arm doesn't look like that, and I don't read body builder magazines, so maybe they are, but if the arm looks familiar or "right" to me, it's because it resembles other superhero art, not something I've seen seen in real life.

Note also that the leg muscles, abs and neck muscles show through Thor's costume, so that whatever he's wearing, it's tight enough to wrap around individual muscles. That, or it's merely an artistic flourish on Maduriera's part, a way of showing how muscular the character is even if it's unrealistic to do so. Such exaggeration and artistic license is perfectly valid, of course, but, obviously, it's a very different tactic than Hitch employed during his run.

Madureira keeps the costume in tact, and his Thor is basically the same person, only drawn differently; perhaps Madureira's Thor has longer hair and a fuller beard. Also of note is the hammer; Madureira draws the standard Marvel Universe version, whereas Hitch's was some kinda of big battle axe/war hammer combo.




Here are the two Hawkeyes. The Ultiamtes 3 one looks dramatically different than the original, but then Hawkeye is a dramatically different person, having lost his family and apparently his will to livee between his first appearance and the beginning of the third volume. So he's grown his hair out and changed costumes.

The new costume is pretty stupid—the bullseye on the forehead, the weird, stylized H—but it's in fitting with the character, who is presented as pretty stupid in the story, and it's not as awful a costume as his Marvel Universe one, which would have looked crazy out of place in the Ultimate Marvel Universe.

I'm not sure why he has a mask now though. Is he protecting his secret identity? Or is it an intentional nod to the lead character in Millar and Jones' Wanted?



Here's Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. What I found most notable about their designs is that Madureira completely retreated from the Hitch designs, which barely even qualify as costumes (Witch's particularly; you could probably put that together visiting your average mall), and put them in variations of their Marvel Universe costumes.

I thought that kind of significant because neither of these characters actually have decent costumes in the Marvel Universe. Why doesn't Quicksilver have silver on? Why does he wear green? What's up with the Witch's little tiara/hood/hat/face frame thing? How does it attach to her head? Why does she wear it? These are the questions I wonder about the Marvel Universe versions, and now the Ultimate versions are dressing like them.

Witch's clothes are suppose to be inappropriately skimpy I guess, as a few panels after that Captain America's all like, "Er, why are you wearing lingerie outside like a whore yo?" This scene is kind of funny in that the siblings are about to go Christmas shopping in New York in December, so they decide to wear superhero costumes, and Scarlet Witch is more scantily clad then most people are when they go to the beach.


Finally, here's the Wasp. Um, to the upper right of Cap's face in the Hitch cover; that's the best cover image of her in her slightly more superhero looking costume from Ultimates 2. As you can see, Hitch obviously didn't have a lot of imagination when it came to the costume designs; there's very little difference between what Wasp wears and what Scarlet Witch wears.

Madureira gave Wasp a more colorful costume and added a mask, an odd choice since she has no secret identity.

It's also worth noting that Madureira's Wasp no longer looks Asian, and has longer, lighter hair to boot, but I don't think this was a conscious choice on Madureira's part to obscure her ethnicity. Because his character design is so influenced by anime and manga, if she were supposed to be Asian, she wouldn't necessarily look any more Asian than any of the other characters. And, as this is set sometime after Ultimates 2, there's no reason she couldn't have grown her hair out and dyed it. Hawkeye grew his out, after all.

Thus concludes are preliminaries. Tomorrow, Ultimates 3 #1!