Welcome to Ultimate March! The Ultimate Universe was, I believe, pitched as a way to get new readers. Take the known characters, but strip out the decades of continuity and sometimes contradictory backstory. Get them back to a base state, hand them to "hot" creative teams to update the origins and characterizations, make them more "mature", and presumably appealing to readers.
It started with Ultimate Spider-Man, which we'll get to in due course, but for now, let's look at Ultimate X-Men, which started under Mark Millar and Adam Kubert. Some things remained much the same. Millar kept Xavier and Magneto on opposing sides, and kept the sides much the same. Mutants live peacefully among humans, or mutants rule/exterminate humans. This version of Magneto was just a little more openly hateful with his language (probably fairly close to Morrison's "mad old bastard" characterization), while Xavier was more openly dodgy with his telepathy.
Millar changed Weapon X from a program that experimented on mutants to one that mostly took them as-is and used them as expendable weapons. Send them out to kill, maim or steal. If they die, who cares. Don't bother with wiping their minds or implanting false memories, because they're not going to ever leave alive. Later writers, Brian K. Vaughn and Robert Kirkman mostly, spent some time on the emotional and mental trauma teenagers that went through that would carry. Teenagers making bad, rash, and melodramatic romantic decisions, among other things. Between Millar and BKV was Bendis, and other than some arc drawn by David Finch that started with Wolverine getting shot up in a diner, then teaming up with Spider-Man and maybe Daredevil, I couldn't tell you a thing that happened. Maybe some religious cult calling itself the Shi'ar approached Jean about being the current host for the Phoenix?
I feel like I enjoyed Vaughn's run best, maybe the parts with Mr. Sinister and the Fenris oddly enough, but not enough for any of it to stick in the collection. The only issues of the ongoing I still have are this two-parter by Chuck Austen and Essad Ribic about Gambit trying to protect a young girl whose parents were killed by Hammerhead, now a bent cop rather than a mobster.
That last sentence is not one I would have ever expected to type.
I don't know that the idea behind the Ultimate Universe worked. The books suffered the
same slow attrition of sales as the regular Marvel Universe, eventually only propped up by the latest introduction of the Ultimate
version of a Marvel character. It's Dazzler, but she's an alcoholic punk rocker! I gave up on this book when Kirkman brought in Cable, and it turned out he was Wolverine from the future.
2 comments:
I did follow a bit of the Ultimate line, but mainly following creators I liked, so I still have Jim Mahfood's Ultimate Team-Up here somewhere, which introduces the Ultimate Fantastic Four, except not, because they introduced them again later on and they were different.
I also had the Ultimate Galactus trilogy because I liked one of the artists, I think.
I didn't follow Ultimate X-Men at all, so I had no idea Kirkman wrote it for a while (I would have read those) nor Chuck Austen (I would not have read those).
I never got into Ultimate FF, which I recall having a lot of Warren Ellis and Greg Land involvement. I think I owned the issue of Ultimate Team-Up where Spider-Man meets Wolverine, but it was excised from the collection long ago.
This Gambit story are the only two issues Austen writes, smack in the middle of Millar's run. Then Bendis for maybe a year or so, then Vaughn for a couple years, then Kirkman. I don't know if he wrote it until the end or if someone else took over in the death throes.
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