Ultimatum #1 Cover

Months and months and months of anticipation has lead up to this, finally: Ultimatum. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love the Ultimate Universe. However, in recent issues, the quality of the Ultimate Universe has seriously declined and many readers have been lost. In comes Ultimatum, to wipe out the load of shit that the Ultimate U has become and start things fresh, with or without certain teams.

The first issue of Ultimatum hits and hits pretty hard. Within the first few pages, we get the first major event and a whole lot of destruction. We don’t get a whole lot of story progress in the opening shot, though. There’s a lot of set up and Jeph Loeb makes sure that he gets all the major players on stage and ready for the action that will be Ultimatum.

Check out the rest of my review after the break.

I was real worried about Ultimatum after Ultimates 3. Jeph Loeb really messed that series up and I felt nervous about what he would be bringing us with Ultimatum. Instead, Loeb delivers a pretty nice and tightly written issue to start off this major-arc in the Utlimate U. As I said, not a lot happens in this first issue, but there’s a major disaster and you get to see the fallout from this from the perspective of all the major players. In addition, Loeb sets up the series quite nicely, finishing things off in a way that was probably expected from most Ultimate U fans, but nevertheless very epic and dark. Speaking of dark, I love that this issue is packed full of really dark tones, with lots of death and destruction. This is Ultimate Universe type writing, and I gladly welcome it back. Gone, thankfully, are Loeb’s attempts at scandalous, soap-opera drama, like he did with Ultimates 3. Glad to see that he realizes that this is an important series and needs to be taken very seriously.

The Flood... It Comeith

And then we come to the art. I was blown away. David Finch did some great work in Ultimate X-Men a ways back and it’s great to see him back in the Ultimate U. He was really needed. Again, I am glad to see that Marvel realized this was an important series and didn’t throw shitty artists at it like they have been doing on Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimates lately. Finch has that sketchy style that I have grown to love and it works really well with the dark tone of this book. His landscapes are truly breathtaking and he draws “speed” (if that makes sense) really, really well. My only real complaint with the art is the inconsistency of detail. With the sketchy style, you expect background people and things to be somewhat… well… sketchy, but Finch seems to have a hard time deciding how much detail to put into features of the foreground characters. So, you get inconsistencies between pages, and even within the same panel, of how much detail is put into the characters. But I’m really nitpicking here, cause on a first read-through, you really don’t notice it.

With all the anticipation, I expected to be let down. I’m not. This is not a perfect issue, but I think the direction Ultimatum is taking is positive and I hope it continues to get better. So far, I am liking it a lot better than Secret Invasion, so we’ll see if that keeps up. I say buy this. It might even provide a good entrance to the Ultimate Universe for new fans.