written by Jonathan Hickman
penciled by Bryan Hitch
inked by Andrew Currie
colored by Alex Sinclair
Jonathan Hickman's plan to rebuild the Ultimate Marvel Universe kicks off in earnest, with evil Reed Richards, aka the Maker escaping from his Damage Control prison and rapidly setting his plan in motion. Will even Marvel's ultra-powerful Illuminati (Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Namor, Black Bolt, Charles Xavier and T'Challa) be able to stop him?
When the first Ultimates issue came out in January 2002, over twenty-one years ago, I was absolutely gobsmacked by Bryan Hitch's astonishing "widescreen" art, which fit Mark Millar's script like a glove. It was Captain America's World War II origin story told like it never had been before, and in fact, it went on to inspire how the character was depicted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Heck the entire first year of issues was basically what served as the narrative backbone of the MCU.
Unfortunately, the quality of the entire line declined precipitously after that first big arc, and by the early 2010s the Ultimate line of comics was on its last legs, having been thrown a bit of a lifeline by the introduction of Miles Morales, a new Spider-Man. Then, in 2016, Jonathan Hickman ended it all, with a storyline I hadn't even stuck around for anymore: Secret Wars. It's fitting, then that Hickman, the man who ended the Ultimate Universe, finally teams up with Hitch, the guy who kicked it into high gear. So what have they brought us?
Well...it's a forty-eight page first issue that is prohibitively expensive. It starts off with a sixteen-page heist, nine pages of which feature exclusively a bunch of anonymous characters whose significance to the plot ends as soon as the Maker appears, and thereafter features a lot of panoramic dialogue pages featuring Mister Fantastic, Black Panther, members of the Illuminati, and Miles Morales. It's only at the tail-end of the issue that we see what the Maker is up to, and to Hickman's credit he leaves an interesting teaser as to what's to come as he starts changing key events to reshape reality.
Narratively, it's a far cry from the 28-pages of full-blooded, action-packed storytelling that Millar and Hitch delivered in 2002 when they presented a hard hitting adventure evocative of Saving Private Ryan in that very first Ultimates issue. Hickman is known for his slow-burn storytelling, but to my mind he still burned a little too slowly here. Apart from the Maker, nobody does anything of significance here, and I truly hope that changes next issue.
There's still a lot to love here, though; Hitch and his Ultimates inker Andrew Currie bring their absolute A game to this issue, though Alex Sinclair, whose vibrant colors made Jim Lee's work on Batman and Superman look brilliant twenty years ago, presents a surprisingly muted color palette considering the scope of this story. Still, art this brilliant is, by itself, almost worth the price of admission.
I'm on board until this end of this story, but I really, really hope future issues are not as expensive as this one was, because if I'm honest the cover price was kind of brutal.
7.5/10
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