Forgot issue no., but it started when Jason Aaron began writing the series after Way’s departure.
Ghost Rider #20 apparently.
Ghost Rider: Hell Bent and Heaven Bound Trade collects the first 6 issues of the run.
For the record, I think Bullseye as Hawkeye is the second coolest thing about Dark Reign next to the Doom/Namor team-up.
He’s just like Hawkeye…except better in every way.
hmmm im unsure. Ever since I read the World War Hulk tiein I just couldnt do it.
Fixed
so would you say that it is a “coloring error” in Secret Warriors # 1? 
No idea what you’re talking about here.
yeah i have secret warriors #1 too and it does seem like a error in there somewhere
AKUMATRUENIGGA- The series is very good ATM, if you didn’t like Way’s run you will like Jason Aaron’s, someone in the previous page posted TPBs that are a good starting point with GR.
Oh and read Captain Britain u Gutter trash!
LOL this kind of thing happened every now in then in comics that came out during World War II. They couldn’t write about what was actually going on in the war most of the time and it was a good way to paint Hitler as a bad guy to the kiddies.
There’s an alien in World War II in the Ultimate Avengers movies for a reason. :wgrin:
Though yeah, in real life there’s plenty of stories out there about Hitler using Aliens and the occult, trying to get his hands on the Spear of Longini and so on. Most of it is probably BS but who knows.
Oh and Marvel Vampire Baron Blood also worked with the Nazis during WW2. Werewolf by Night was nuetral. :looney:
So…the Ultimate Universe.
I been getting into it recently through trades and learning more and more about its history, why it succeded, and why is now kinda redundant.
In the late '90s, Marvel was bankrupt. Too much big stupid crossovers, too much gimmicky variant covers, too much focus on artists like Mcfarlane/Liefield than the actual writers; just a giant fucking mess. However, the movies Blade, and to a much larger extent, X-men, made Marvel a legitmate company again. People were interested in their books. The problem was new readers would pick up an issue of Uncanny X-men and realize they have no idea what the flying fuck is going on. Thus, the Ultimate universe was born: Where the stories hit the reset button and writers like Bendis and Millar can run wild on the characters. Beginning with only Ultimate Spidey, then blossoming to Ult. X-men, FF, and the Ultimates, the books were a huge success. A decade later, and now most readers just don’t give a damn.
What happen?
I think the biggest reason is the creative teams behind the book. At the time, writers like Bendis and Millar brought a whole lot of fresh ideas to make these decades-old characters hip and edgy for the new generation. They created these characters the way they wanted, with the stories they wanted to tell. The artists like Hitch/Bakley were right there with them to help create this universe. But after these creators left, then what? You start bringing in new guys who have no idea what the fuck to do with these previous creator-owned characters. It differs from series to series:
The Ultimates’ first two “years”(if you wanna call it that, since they never came out on time >_>) was excellent stuff, but then Jeph Loeb comes in for the third season and it all goes to hell.
Ultimate Fantastic Four was pretty solid(I liked the opening arc with Bendis, and I really enjoyed what I’ve read of Ellis’ more sci-fi oriented work), then Millar comes in with some really fun imiganative arcs that are the best the series had ever been, then Carrey jumps in the driver seat and rams the series into a brick wall.
Ultimate X-Men had Millar have the X-men as 21st century characters should be, with cool new outfits, fun personalities, and exciting story arcs. Bendis then came for a mostly solid run that gave the cast more character(because lets face it, character devlopment isn’t really Millar’s strong point, and this is coming from a hardcore Millar FANATIC), and Vaughn also made the team more well-rounded and made some interesting new story arcs(Magnetic North might just be the best the series ever had). Then Kirkman starts to recycle plotlines from the 90s(Apoc? Cable!? ONSLAUGHT!?!?) and all goes to shit.
Theres a reason why Ultimate Spider-Man seems to be the only Ult. book people give a damn about: consistent creative teams. Bendis has been here the entire time, with one main artist for the better part of 130+ issues.
Another thing that led to the Ultimates downfall is the cursed c-word: continuity. The whole purpose for these universe was so new readers can forget about these decades worth of backstory and get in on the ground floor. But of course, its been a decade worth of time, and now we DO have lots of continuity, so new readers would be just as confused picking up an issue of Ult. X-men as they would with Uncanny.
So basically, we have all the great, fresh writers leaving('cept Bendis) and the decade-worth of backissues, plus the fact that the regular univsere is starting to look a lot like the Ultimate one(Spider-man unmarried, Avengers roster is similar), so now its just like “Whats the fucking point?”.
The only reason I can see these Ultiamte universe working is that Marvel hit the reset button like its doing now every 5-10 years and getting some better creative teams on board, and with Mark Millar returning to Ultimates Avengers(HELL YES!) and Bendis still on board for Ult. Spidey(with a worse artist, ugh), I think we look forward to the Ultimate series getting back on track.
tl;dr version: So how about that Ultimate universe huh? It used to be a big deal, now not so much.
"You must spread some more rep. around before giving any to DeathReaper"
Those are some good points mate, and I really enjoyed reading your post.
The current Crisis; Ultimatum may yet breath new life into the Ultimate series and bring them back to the fun series they were when they started.
I mean come on 24 issues of Mark Miller on Ultimates? Hells yeah.
Ultimatum is a bullshit piece of comic book. It’s like Jeph Loeb sat around drinking beers with his frat boy brothers one night and said, “DUDE, wouldn’t it be cool if we killed off a bunch of superheroes?! I have this AWESOME idea about the Blob eating the Wasp!”
Come on, now, son. That shock-value shit’s so 2005. Get with it. The David Finch art is a perfect fit. It’s like Loeb was rereading Avengers Disassembled and decided it was up to him to one-up the way Bendis killed off Ant-Man and the Vision.
Ultimates 3 isn’t able to be defended at all. That whole series was just Loeb trying to come up with an excuse to throw the Ultimates, Spider-Man, Venom, Magneto, and Wolverine into one lousy story that happens to take place in the Savage Land so someone can fight a T-Rex. Has there ever been a story that takes place in the Savage Land that DIDN’T involve fighting a T-Rex? Loeb’s just a master of regurgitating every cliche in the book. (You see what I did there?)
Oh, and the final page of Ultimates 3 is pure comedy. It’s unintentional, I’m sure, but, I still laughed long and hard. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but it’s worth going to the store and flipping through the hardback just to see that last page. It’s the quintessential Jeph Loeb “shocker” ending, where he comes up with what he thinks is a brilliant ambiguous twist ending, only it’s actually completely silly and detracts even further from what he already wrote.
Jeph Loeb comics don’t respect my intelligence at all. Even Marvel Adventures and other kiddie comics respect a reader’s intellect on some level. Loeb comics are so devoid of internal logic that I find them grossly offensive and, quite frankly, an utter disgrace to Western civilization.
I’m starting to believe that Loeb may be our generation’s CLAREMONT. Thirty-three years from now, we’ll look back and say, “Wow, Jeph Loeb really peaked with The Long Halloween (1997). Everything after that was straight downhill.” And his legacy will be so tarnished that there will even be fanatical haters who will stand on upside-down milk crates on street corners, preaching against anyone ever using the Savage Land in a comic ever again. Chris Claremont be turning over in his grave right now.
That’s it…that’s it, feel the hate grow…hate…HATE!!! MWA-HAHAHA!!
cough
Was i talking out loud?
I’m pretty sure Jeph Loeb was sent by DC to destroy Marvel from within.
I agree that Ultimatum is a big pile of fuck, but I think it may work in being a nice reset button for the Ultimate universe. I’ll just have to avoid New Ultimates with my life.
Loeb’s worst comic is still Hulk though. It’s taking all of the fantastic characterization that was in Planet Hulk/early WWH and SHITTING on it. Even Marvel knows it’s a piece of shit. WHY DO THEY STILL LET HIM WRITE IT? Oh wait, because it’s their best selling ongoing. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?
The problem with the Ultimate line is the same problem everyone called on day one. It was started for people who didn’t want to deal with 40+ years of continuity. Well unless every single issue of the Ultimates line was self contained sooner or later their continuity would become a monster too. So Marvel would either have to create a new series for readers who do not want to deal with continuity or do a semi-reboot of sorts.
The other problem is that Marvel used it as a testing ground so they could find the limits of what they can do in 616. Like if you want Avengers to be hella different than your father’s Avengers and not deal with 40+ years of Avengers storylines, well you can just read New Avengers. If you want Spider-Man being single, well… save the soon to be canceled Spider-Girl (sooned to be moved into Spider-Man Family) he’s single everywhere.
This is just how Marvel approaches everything nowadays. They are trying to get new readers and screwing over older readers. Yes, whoever was there when Ultimates started, you’re already too old for Marvel to cater to you.
Fret not, whoever jumps on Ultimates now after said crossover will screwed over in another 10 years. If the audience is still there.
A few years back Soap Operas came to the realization that there are no new Soap Opera fans, whoever has been watching Soaps has been doing so for 10 + years. So they cater to older fans, bringing back old (dead…) characters and bringing back old storylines.
Wish Marvel would do the same, or find a better balance. The new fans they are attracting are not little kids which is the future of comics. They are just getting people who buy book A to switch over to book B. Good for short term, does not seem good for long term. Time will tell I guess.
My take on the Ultimate universe is that the six issue/written for trade format wore on people especially with creators that they weren’t exactly sure of. Personally I think several stories from Carey’s run on UFF kills several of Bendis’ USM story arcs but a lot of people would disagree. Thus if they don’t like one story arc from a creator, they jump off the book and that happened with every Ultimate book except USM and to a lesser extent Ultimates because people love to see either the arc or how Loeb ruins the characters Millar revamped.
Second they at first they were supposed to be gateway and movie audience accessible books but part of what many fans of the Ultimate universe enjoyed was seeing different takes on 616 characters and some creators ran with this creating vastly different characters that could not be explained away to movie audiences. How do you explain to a kid that just saw Nightcrawler as a kind, spiritual and reluctant assassin that in the Ultimate universe he had just lost his mind because of a teammate being gay and some other Weapon X torture no one mentioned before? Ultimate continuity caught up with the Ultimate universe, which is why they gave up a few years ago and introduced the Marvel Adventures books for newer readers. And in a way, it actually worked a lot better, since while it would reuse older stories, they would also do original ones usually within a one to two issue format.
In the end, I kind of wish Marvel would kill the Ultimate universe, I would have loved an epic Millar and Bendis penned sweet farewell instead we have Loeb in what looks like a WildStorm attempt at a line wide relaunch. And WildStorm while having a few good elements hasn’t been that successful with it.
When it started, people were saying the Ultimate Universe would crap out in a few years anyway, and now they’re being proven right. Only reason it took this long is because the books were always late, so it dragged it out.
You guys have got it - the reason the Ultimate books are so stupid is because from DAY ONE, they were in this insane dash to beat the normal 616 books in terms of insanely complicated continuity.
They were throwing in random characters every other issue just for the thrill of seeing them Ultimatized, it was crazy. There was no sense of pace or whatever to the universe, just a crazy dash to tell the craziest story you could tell and just do it over and over again.
The point of the Ultimate books wasn’t so that you could just do whatever you wanted to do because these crazy ideas would never fly in the normal books…the purpose was to give readers a fresh universe and reset all that complicated continuity stuff so that you could just pick up a new story arc and not be intimidated by like forty years of prerequisite reading before understanding it.
And ironically that’s the main problem with all the Ultimate books now - they’ve mixed up all the continuity of the universe in only like a fraction of the time it took for the normal comics.
Doesn’t help that a lot of these books just sucked total shit.
Ultimates 3 is the most hilariously bad comic I’ve ever read…I swear to God, it’s the comic version of the Street Fighter movie.
But it was already the same stuff with Mark Millar in the two series before, and how he couldn’t tell a story or portray a character without hitting you over the head with it. Jarvis couldn’t make an appearance without being super fabulously gay, and every single appearance of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver was like “Oh hey, remember, we’re sister and brother…AND LOVERS!”
Just like Apollo and Midnighter once Millar took over The Authority from Ellis.
Loeb - in his unique idiot way - just took it to the next logical step and actually came out and explicitly said it, like it was some SHOCKINGLY EPIC plot development. When Mark Millar had already been cramming it into our faces for the last four years.
Ultimate Spider-Man was the only good book in the batch, and that’s largely to do with the fact that it’s had the same great team on it for like three thousand issues…after that, who knows if anyone can write it like Bendis could. Especially if they keep giving it to guys like Loeb or Millar.
Also, I cannot, I CANNOT believe that you compared The Long Halloween to Claremont’s past accomplishments, Zephy, mainly his Uncanny X-Men run in the 80’s. Blasphemy!
Claremont is just forever stuck in the 80’s. It’s like he won the 1985 MVP award as a dominant big man inside, but just can’t figure out why he sucks now after zone defense was implemented.
Loeb was never that good - every time you read The Long Halloween again, it gets worse. And it’s amazing how bad Dark Victory was, considering it was the same team and came out so shortly afterwards. He’d be nothing without Tim Sale, NOTHING.
…
A Superman For All Seasons might be one of my favourite Superman stories ever though, I can’t hate on that.
Also, Jeph Loeb wrote the screenplay for Commando (one of the top three greatest movies of all time) and thus I can’t bring myself to ever properly hate on him to the extent of which he deserves.
I wasn’t really comparing The Long Halloween to Claremont’s '80s work. I actually was thinking of the late '70s, specifically the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past, two of the most overrated superhero stories of all time. (They might’ve been above average for their era, but that shit’s unreadable now. They don’t hold up unless you have some sort of personal vested interest in the X-Men.) I guess with The Long Halloween, we now have some sort of unholy troika of the Three Most Overrated Superhero Stories of All Time.
If Claremont won the MVP in 1985, he must have been the oldest and most washed-up center to ever win any award, ever. I always looked at him as sort of a rookie of the year who never lived up to his potential… Kind of in the Derrick Coleman vein, if Coleman had played in the '70s and still ended up being a disappointment in the pro leagues.
I mean, Claremont had some decent plots and ideas which provided him with a fairly solid fundamental base. He could play in the low post, he had a few strong moves, and he had a great perimeter shooting touch for a big man. Then he just fell in love with the three point shot, relying on it to the detriment of his inside moves, and decided it would be okay to write excessive expository dialogue in all of his comics as his weight ballooned and he became an alcoholic. Tragic, really. The Association tried to help him out by trading Byrne for a bunch of different dudes (Cockrum, Romita Jr., Smith, Silvestri, Lee) but he could never live up to the promise he held in his early years and college. Instead, Claremont (or maybe Coleman, I forget who I’m talking about now) decided to play just well enough to continue receiving paychecks until he was unceremoniously forced to retire… Only Claremont obviously hasn’t retired. He’s just plodding along like he always does, heaving up three pointer after three pointer while his artist teammates stand around praying he’ll set himself up in the low post and maybe get a rebound one day. Something like that. You get my point.
Jeph Loeb, on the other hand, is a dude in the Vince Carter mold. Only instead of being “Half-Man, Half-A-Season” he’s “Half-Man, Half-A-Series” in the sense that the artist does his half of the work in a comic. I mean, you’re a Raptors fan - I completely understand why you hate Jeph Loeb so much more than Claremont. But that’s because you’re a Raptors fan. It’s personal with you. Your hero, the guy who brought basketball to Canada, introduced Toronto to the slam dunk, and wrote Superman for All Seasons decided to demand a trade. Then in interviews, Loeb is all like, “I didn’t have to play that hard because I had talent. You get spoiled when you can do the things I can do. You see that you don’t have to work at it.” That would piss off any fan. Me, I’m able to take a few steps back and look at it objectively.
I mean, seriously - if age weren’t a factor and you could pluck these players from their respective primes, wouldn’t you rather have Vince Carter & Tim Sale over Derrick Coleman & John Byrne? It’s so obvious to me that I have no idea why no one else sees this.
I’m not really sure how Antawn Jamison fits into all of this, but I’m glad we made that trade back in the day.
Although now that I think about it, the Warriors are kind of like Top Cow… We had Run TMC back in the early '90s when Image was launching, and then we had a decade’s worth of pain and shitty comics until one awesome playoff series with Wanted. Then things have been going sour again… No one else feels my pain… Except maybe Mark Millar, the greatest writer to never play for the Toronto Raptors.
Look at that horrible cover by Greg Land. I’m not even an artist but I know poor graphic design sense when I see it. That picture’s way too busy and yet not chaotic enough to imply a ferocious battle. Emma Frost and the Black Queen (or whoever that is) don’t even look like they’re fighting. They look like they’re in the middle of a pillow fight that got out of hand. Look at the way Wolverine’s right bicep looks like a camel hump. Disgusting. And why is he posed like he’s slashing the air when Deathstrike is flying at him from another angle? What’s with her nipples? Are they covered in adamantium? And how come Spiral has an arm coming out of the back of her neck? What, was Land unable to find a pornographic photo reference for a six-armed lady?
Is that enough hate for you, Shengy?
Run TMC still stands as one of the greatest sports nicknames of all time…it’s just so good, made better by the fact that it was like actually, objectively good, like in terms of on-court results.
The Dark Phoenix Saga is definitely works better now as a memory of a story versus as an actual story, but gasp! Days of Future Past too!?! I readily admit I haven’t actually read the actual story in like…over ten years, but a crazy complicated story about time travel at a time before crazy complicated time travel stories became the norm…is okay, above average for the era but unreadable now, okay, fine.
That cover with like the crossed out pictures and stuff was way too good though.
Loeb is more like Kenyon Martin or Tyson Chandler, who’s made a career out of running alongside a HOF point in Jason Kidd or Chris Paul, getting like 8 points a game just on garbage putback buckets or fastbreak alley-oops.
(…or is it like Steve Nash or Chris Duhon playing under Mike D’Antoni’s seven seconds or less system? A borderline All-Star suddenly becoming two time MVP in his late 30’s and a borderline starter dropping like 20+ assist games just out nowhere? Though I’m morally and federally obligated to never badmouth national treasure Steve Nash, so we’ll throw this comparison out.)
Anyway, you take Kidd or Paul away, and who’s feeding Jeph Loeb those sweet fast break outlets? Jeph Loeb can’t create his own shot.
Alex Ross would have found a way. Fuck that CrossGen castaway loser.
For everyone who asked about how the hell Osborn AKA THE MUTHAFUCKA GREEN GOBLIN is in charge of everything…
Well here is the Preview for Dark Avengers #5 coming in may from the Marvel May solicits
DA #5
Spoiler
When the public is reminded of Norman’s terrible past, Norman’s wheeling and dealing becomes a public concern. Plus, some of the Avengers are getting frisky with each other, and that can’t be good. Plus the return of…the Cabal!
Dark Reign BABY
Has Jeph Loeb ever NOT run alongside an All-Star caliber penciler?
Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke, David Finch, Jim Lee, Ed McGunniness, Joe Mad…these are all HOF guys in the prime of their careers!