#ultimate endgame

So, this was the first and last Neo Ultimate Universe event. The real question is, was it better than Ultimatum? Yes! Wasp made it out uncannibalized, all’s good in the world.

The rest of the review will likely struggle to reach that level of positivity so I hope you enjoyed that.

It’s tough to write around the disappointment, so let’s bring it to the forefront: despite the Finale issue promising that we’re getting more of these characters at some point in the vague future, fact of the matter is, most every single creative team has left the project. Superstar Deniz Camp specifically has signed an exclusivity deal with DC Comics, which must have been one of the easiest decisions he’s ever made, and Jonathan Hickman has moved on to the Midnight Universe, where he will write yet another X-Men book that he’ll tell us he always wanted to write. It’s got vampires or something, I dunno.

As stories, event books have two specific jobs, regardless of what they actually are. They have to both be the culmination of stories we’ve been following for a while, and they have to work in isolation as a fun romp you can go back to whenever you feel nostalgia for the specific context. It’s important that an event is a unit, but it also has to be a stopgate for whatever you were doing before. At least if your book is the central focus of the event; usually you get some tie-ins so people buy other comics that are tangentially related to whatever’s happening.

Endgame started after all the books except The Ultimates were finished. There were no tie-ins and quite frankly no time to do anything other than the main story. However, Ultimates is relatively crucial for you to enjoy your time with the main event—despite it saying that nowhere. I guess they figured that you’d be reading both anyway, if you cared about either? It’s regardless, awkward, sort of weirdly amateurish editing. It feels like it assumes people in a year will know how you were thinking during publication.

Awkward describes a lot of the book’s attempts at storytelling, actually. Taking it as its own thing, it’s 4 issues of endless, kinda uninspired fighting followed by one final issue dedicated to ending Doom’s character arc and, thus, the story. The Finale issue is one epilogue for each book, and they don’t really connect— really, by the time they collect these books into single volumes or something, you should have the appropriate Finale portion just added to the regular stories. They mean nothing to each other. Just like most Ultimate books, I suppose.

I’m sorry, I’m rambling, but I genuinely barely have anything to talk about. The two-year long culmination of hundreds of pages was just a regular, run of the mill boss fight against an enemy that writers made too powerful. It’s a story about a villain who’s up to no good, and heroes who have to stop him despite not having a plan. The Maker, who is like 50% of the reason the original Ultimate Universe is still relevant, didn’t exist in these books. He left as soon as the prologue was done and then came back with a lot of the same bits and mannerisms, but he’s a tree now.

I don’t know, man, what was supposed to happen? The “Howard is stuck in the City” plotline went nowhere; he immediately turns out to be comic relief and dies. The Kang storyline went actually nowhere, which is wild considering Endgame was probably always going to be these 5 issues. Spider-Man dies in one issue and comes back in the other none worse for wear, and it’s fine.

I also hope you didn’t want anyone who’s not in the Ultimates to do anything. Armor is nowhere to be found and the Secret Society X-Men hang out with Storm doing damage control that doesn’t quite amount to anything. Black Panther comes in, says he’s going to nuke Latveria, and then it doesn’t happen. Killmonger has this whole thing where people notice he’s moving from Africa to Europe all by himself, and when he gets there there’s… nothing for him to do, because there’s nothing for any character to do.

The Guardians of the Galaxy come in as the Hail Mary and, after a cool little bit with Daredevil, also don’t do anything. Wolverine and Phoenix, the only survivors of his title, attack the Maker once and it fails. This is the culmination of 2 years of storytelling and none of these stories really matter to this moment. These characters would have done exactly the same things in their own issue 1, maybe with a different costume.

But, hey, as I mentioned before, Doom does get one good one in there.

Doom is the best part of the Neo Ultimate Universe project. He’s the only one that really justifies the experience, he’s the only one that gets a complete character arc, he’s almost the sole emotional bedrock of Ultimates and, overall, if an issue had Doom in it, it was usually better than anything else that Marvel released that month.

It’s tough to exaggerate how much Camp cooked with this character, honestly, He’s the most salient, worst crime the Maker committed in many ways— self-loathing made manifest, someone who hates his own existence with the same burning passion that the Maker seemingly hates everything else. We accompanied him through the fifty-seven stages of grief that he invented throughout the story, and I think there wasn’t really any other way to end this story than to end him as a person.

His ultimate sacrifice is easy to see coming, but it still makes for a good finale. The tulpas of the Fantastic Four that live in his head manage to beat the crap out of the Maker’s presence in his mind, which is rather funny. The reveal that he gave himself the powers of the Fantastic Four feels… like it’s a bit late for that? Like, I figured we were doing this the first time he showed up in a cover by himself, but after it was never addressed again, I assumed that boat had sailed. It also ruins the design, but that’s fine, we’re not gonna see that design again anyway.

The fact that what destroys the Maker is the Fantastic Four’s love, even though they never even existed here, is pretty narratively satisfying. It’s not as satisfying as it could be, not even close, as a conclusion to this event— the four issues before have nothing to do with it, and it just comes out like Doom finally decided to fight back in the end— but it’s still like, objectively speaking a competent way to wrap up this character arc and this rivalry.

You can probably tell by the disinterest dripping from my words that competent isn’t quite cutting it here.

I want to talk about the technical aspect of the book, unrelated to the writing. Namely, I don’t think this book looks very good.

It alternates between two main art styles, one drawn by Jonas Scharf and colored by Edgar Delgado, mostly contained to the City’s storyline, and the other by the artist/colorist duo of Terry and Rachel Dodson. You might remember Scharf from the Ultimate Incursion crossover featuring Miles Morales, and the Dodson, despite I believe being new to the Ultimate Universe, have a very strong portfolio that I’m sure you’ve seen before in works such as Spider-Man vs The Sinister Sixteen, for instance. They both have very distinct, very specific artstyles that are instantly recognizable.

Why the hell does the comic look like this, then?

Like, no, it does not look terrible, it does not look consistently bad, but so many of these panels feel awkward or weird, or off-model. These people do not look like this anywhere else, because so much of their specific books’ feel was defined by specific artists and colorists. The Ultimates look like how Juan Frigeri and Federico Blee tell me they look like, or Von Randal, or even Pere Pérez. The X-Men look like however Peach Momoko wants them to look like. Spider-Man is supposed to be the easiest way for me to enjoy some good, old fashioned Marco Checchetto art, with impeccable Matthew Wilson colors.

The decision to then bring in artists and colorists that don’t have nearly as much experience with these characters, sometimes not at all, is incredibly fucking baffling to me. Moments that are supposed to hit on imagery alone fall flat because this is not how the moment is supposed to look like. The panels don’t flow the way panels usually flow on anyone’s books. They didn’t even bring in any other letterers other than Cory Petit! And I like Cory! But his fucking character is the one who dies!

I just don’t understand the logic behind the editing of this book. These are obviously the wrong decisions, the wrong people, the wrong timing, the wrong everything— they made sure almost every single other book was finished before starting this one, but they couldn’t make sure the artists were available? They couldn’t make sure everyone had what they needed to make it to the most important book of the line? We’re doing new guys that have never worn the jersey for the fucking World Cup game?!

Like, who is this for? Who wants the ending to have almost nothing to do with the stories you’re telling? Who wants new people to be the ones to welcome you into the last time you’re going to see these creative teams together? Who’s going to go back to this and be like, oh yeah, THAT’S how Tony Stark is supposed to look like?

It’s just such a mess. It’s distracting how much of a mess it feels to read this considering the road we took to get here. Haters talk about the end of the Krakoa era in better faith than I can muster for this, this just makes me feel bad. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.