I'm reading Ultimate Marvel for the first time (other than some of Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates once some time back) and The Ultimates 3/Ultimatum is amazing. Jeph Loeb is a master storyteller. How did nobody stop this? You really have to see it, reading reviews doesn't quite grasp it. "DO YOU THINK THIS A STANDS FOR FRANCE?" is so seemingly small in comparison to The House of Ideas™ that Loeb sets up and drops into just ten issues. And then Bendis just writes around it like nothing happened and as if no key characters were killed.
Actually, the worst part is what is seemingly Bendis' insistence that the entire Ultimate Marvel storyline across all the books takes place during a single year with like a six month time skip for Ultimatum. The other books aren't as anal about this as Spider-Man although they're arguably worse offenders by going along with it and making you ask "this is all supposed to have happened in just a couple months?" In one of Warren Ellis' issues he has Nick Fury list all the things that have apparently happened and it's clear that Ellis is totally not on board with the timeline. (I didn't get the idea that Ultimate Gah Lak Tus is supposed to take place over a really busy weekend for example.)
Seeing Bendis in action is remarkable too, the unrestrained dialogue spilling over pages and pages going nowhere and saying nothing, it doesn't sound any more realistic and I just skim it which can be like speedreading entire USM issues since he takes decompression to the maximum point. No idea if he kept this format when he got to Superman or if DC tried to break him of it. I'll find that out at some later point in life. At one point I'm convinced that the timeline in Spider-Man actually starts going backwards as Mary Jane is implied to be younger than she was a hundred issues earlier.
Most of the Ultimate Marvel series have really bad art at some point too. And Ultimate Fantastic Four eventually degrades to where I wasn't sure if they were editing the book in Paint or what. It's a shame because UFF and the collective books are the arguably the more compelling of the Big Four books. UX is really hit or miss depending on the writer and how big of blue balls they're going to give you by up and disappearing in the middle of a story so it concludes two issues too soon with a deus ex machina. USM is best when it has Spider-Man as the focus the least. Also none of these artists apparently have an idea what a sixteen year old should look like in terms of if they should be children or just slightly smaller adults, UFF is the worst offender again because of the artist changes but UX and USM (despite having a single artist for most of it) also have people swapping between looking twelve or looking [censored to protect bork's sensibilities] with no inbetween other than they know they can't draw the tits too big on the girls because that'd be awkward. It wouldn't be as distracting (stuff like Teen Titans and X-Men has always had this problem) except that they are constantly calling to and remarking about the ages in the dialogue UX is the funniest offender by stating so often Jean Gray is NINTEEN GOING ON TWENTY making her and Storm all totally legal. Three pages of SEXY SUE STORM hitting on Reed and bending over suggestively, CUT TO HER DAD YELLING AT HER "I don't want you getting hurt! You're only sixteen!" Bendis gets around this too with his "they're all sixteen... sexy, single, sixteen, especially the adults" head-canon.
That said, the
idea of Ultimate Marvel even as it fell into backwards is an interesting one, but it should be like an ongoing thing. Say, every 15 years, with a definitive ending. Then you wait a few years and restart the line again set in the present day. I'd like something like DC's Earth One to have an ongoing anthology type series, like Earth 2 was, rather than just graphic novels on no set timeline of how often they come out. And like The Ultimates and the many Ultimate [mini-series] served as. Anything would just be nice to have one of these universes actually age and develop people again, so like Reed Richards doesn't have to constantly be updated into what war he supposedly was in,
just set it and forget it, then end the whole thing after 10-20 years and reboot. Just don't do it to your main universe, keep stretching those out until they collapse. Otherwise you have people like me snarking on how Batman went through five Robins in five years because you stupidly thought "oh yeah everybody is set to five years 'old' now but we won't toss out any of the canon for... Batman... and Green Lantern and..." One thing Marvel could do that DC couldn't (because they already did it) is jump back and set a Marvel Universe that "starts" in the 1980's, you could have all the blatantly Soviet villains as actual Soviet villains (like Black Widow or CRIMSON DYNAMO) again briefly, then the Soviet collapse could be done in terms of the superhero arms race with the "bad guys" then becoming freelancers around the globe and so on, I'd find that fun as we never really had that "timeline" whereas we had the 1960's and 2000's with Marvel and Ultimate Marvel. Plus you could write to events that already happened rather than to events as they're happening.
I'd even call it Ultimate Marvel still, whichever version, 1980's or 2020's start, with the understanding that this will only last for 10-20 years maximum, everything ends at some point and then reboots, etc. Then people would realize there's Marvel/DC which keeps going, and Ultimate Marvel/All-Star DC which starts over every decade or two. Only it would be on purpose and deliberate.
