#ultimate comics

Oof, it really does hit harder since the new Hawkeye is indigenous.

2002's The Ultimates Vol.1 #1 cover by Bryan Hitch and Paul Mounts.

In the old Ultimate Universe, the Maker's story--as created by Brian Bendis and developed by Jonathan Hickman and Al Ewing--was one that offered the question of what if Reed Richards was wrong? What if Victor von Doom had been right all along? From the beginning he was a character who overestimated his own competency, desperately needing to be the smartest man in every room, needing to believe that the hard working boy genius would easily overthrow the privileged elites surrounding him and make everything his.

He couldn't handle that his aristocratic classmate, Victor, had a better grasp of the fundamental math than he did, and out of jealousy and insecurity ignored his warnings. He spent years quietly resenting that his celebrated mentor's daughter, Sue's, accomplishments in the biosciences were spoken of in the same breath as his own. And most of all, he despised that Anthony Stark, the personification of everything he hated in the world, really was "just smarter than [him.]"

In the old Ultimate Universe, Tony Stark made Reed feel like a child. He was never able to exist out of Tony's shadow, and define himself as the unrivaled intellect he saw himself as. In the new Ultimate Universe, the Maker has altered the timeline so that Tony is the insecure young boy, and--had he not underestimated Howard Stark--he would have been the one to never step outside the overbearing father figure's shadow.

In the shared grand finale of Jonathan Hickman's run on Fantastic Four and New Avengers both, the Reed Richards of Earth-616 was indisputably the better Reed Richards than his Earth-1610 counterpart. He built the life for himself that the Maker believed should have been given to him by right, and though Mr Fantastic didn't always fully appreciate what he had, he got where he did without abandoning his empathy and compassion for the people around him.

Most of all, unlike the Maker, the Reed Richards of Earth-616 was Right, and his version of Victor was wrong. And so when the Maker built the new world, he not only obliterated the identity of the local Reed Richards, forcing him to live trapped forever within the iron mask of Dr. Doom, but he made sure that in this world, the space flight would be a failure. Just so that "Doom" would be wrong, and it would cost him everything.

In Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter Parker was the golden child of the Avengers community, warmly accepted in a way that the Maker never was, his potential for greatness constantly praised by Stark, Fury, Thor, the big men at the top whose recognition Reed always wanted. In the new Ultimate Spider-Man, more than removing a potential threat to himself in the form of Spider-Man, the Maker stole that life from him by subjecting him to a mundane existence that he (Reed) would think is worthless, while setting himself up at the very top of what was once their shared community.

We see this pattern in the supporting characters as well. The Nick Fury of Earth-1610 was always one step ahead of his Reed Richards, and held it over him. The Nick Fury of the Maker's new world is brainwashed and hypnotized, forced to live unknowingly through the same sequence of events, the same failed rebellions, all scripted by Reed himself, over and over again, allowed to realize the truth only briefly before each end.

In Ultimate Enemy, Reed Richards rebels against the world he believed was oppressing him. He was summarily rejected, exiled, and defeated, by his closest friends and family. He went on to create the City of the Children of Tomorrow, which warred with present day humanity only to be defeated again and again. At the same time, Ultimate Comics X-Men would depict Kitty Pryde leading an armed insurrection against the US government, supported by all of her friends, before going on to collectively found the mutant nation of Utopia, which endured until the end of the Ultimate Universe.

Given Jonathan Hickman's work with the X-Men, I think the image of the mutant communist-anarchist city arising spontaneously in a barren wasteland, standing opposite the Maker's carefully planned, meticulously engineered, city of post-human supermen that endlessly consume the land around them should be a resonant one. Only now in the new world, Reed's artificial civilization won out, and its the mutants who are destroyed in failed uprising. In Ultimate Wolverine, Kitty is living in exile in Russia, hunted by Logan, Piotr Rasputin, and Illyana Rasputina, the three characters she is most closely associated with among fans. It's like Reed gave his own self-inflicted downfall to someone he's met only twice (but who annoyed him profoundly enough that he couldn't help himself).

But its Bobby da Costa that suffers under the full brunt of the Maker's pettiness. Following the third Secret Wars, the Maker sets up shop on Earth-616 and tries to play at being the foe of Eternity and Galactus, only for Bobby to just dispense with him on the pages of Al Ewing's US Avengers. Like Nick, da Costa is someone who sees through Reed's schemes and plans around him with ease. Like Stark, he was simply smarter than Reed was, and didn't need to even try to get the better of him. He dismantled everything the Maker had built, and subjected him to the final indignity of throwing him in prison, never thinking about him again. Reed didn't even get to be nemesis to a new hero, he just got jumped and locked away without a care by someone that was playing on another level from him.

In the new Ultimate Universe, da Costa's father has a role in Reed's inner circle, thanks to the superhuman strength that he acquires from stealing Bobby's blood. The man that humiliated him, now depersoned and treated as a mere consumable commodity. He's forced to go everywhere with his father, never leaving his side, and Reed never has to look at him or worry about him at all.

In the original Ultimate Universe, the gag surrounding Hulk- and much of what went into The Ultimates should be understood through the lens of a gag- was that his uncontrollable rage and homicidal toxic masculinity made him a millstone around the necks of the rest of the roster, their first major deployment being to get him under control after he loses his shit and kills 800 people in New York while trying to kill and eat Freddie Prinze Jr- an embarrassment that gets hushed up after the fact. In the grand finale of the first volume they barely, barely manage to get him aimed at the invading aliens by telling him the aliens called him gay, and then he still nearly eats Hawkeye before the tranqs kick in. He's less a part of the team than a barely directable bomb, emblematic of the fact that the Ultimates, collectively, do not have their shit together-it's a rotten idea to the core.

In the New Ultimate Universe, he's the one member of the classic Avengers lineup who's thrown in with The Maker, again standing in opposition to the rest of the team, but for the complete opposite reason. He's very visibly a road-not-taken of the Ultimate Hulk- same color scheme- but he worked his shit out, he found a self-help book, he became less insecure, less self-absorbed, altogether more functional. And it turns out that a "functional" version of that hulk comes out the other side as an Adrian-Veidt style of holier-than-thou Compassionate-enough-to-Kill-thousands-for-the-greater-good kind of figure, who callously tests the mutagenic effects of gamma exposure on isolated indigenous populations on the side. Fucker built nukes for the army- were we expecting a saint?