Like pretty much every other comics reader with an Internet connection, I'd heard that "Ultimatum," the line-wide crossover that more or less destroyed Marvel's Ultimate line, was terrible. Despite strong sales that kept it in the top ten for its entire run, the series was almost universally panned, with readers going so far as to declare it one of, if not the, most mind-bendingly terrible comics ever printed. So when I sat down to read the trade for a ComicsAlliance review, I was prepared for the worst.

The two scenes that everyone had talked about: The Blob eating the Wasp and then being eaten himself in revenge. And it just got worse from there.

As strange as it sounds, we've all sort of agreed that while none of these characters are real, some of them are more "real" than others, and for all its flaws and strengths, the Ultimate universe is essentially fanfiction with production values, where creators are allowed to pick and choose the different aspects of existing characters to bang together in new ways. But if Millar and Bendis were doing fanfiction based on the Marvel Universe, then Loeb is doing fan-fiction based on Millar, taking Millar's knack for characters who only speak in one-liners and Big Action Explosions and boiling it down to something that has even less plot.

And it is terrible fanfiction at that. It's the kind of story written by a teenager that wants to sound like a grownup. For one thing, big ideas are introduced without even a cursory attempt at explaining them. The book starts, for instance, with Magneto, inverting the Earth's magnetic poles in that grand tradition of dubious comic book science, which not only causes a tidal wave to hit Manhattan (and nowhere else, and only once), it also causes a blizzard in Latveria that comes on so suddenly that people are instantly frozen solid while walking around outside.

Similarly, there's a scene in #3 where Magneto tells Mystique that he's got important plans for her.
So what's this important plan that had to be ominously (and "specifically") foreshadowed?
Nothing. It doesn't exist. The next time she shows up, she's shooting at the Hulk with a flamethrower, and then later she's hanging out with Sabretooth, who apparently doesn't have a healing factor in the Ultimate universe. The panel above serves absolutely no purpose in the story.

My favorite example of the outright childish nature of this story, however, is the fact that the climactic battle takes place in a room lined with stained glass windows so that no fewer than three characters can each crash through one in rapid succession shouting things like "IT'S OVER!" or "I'LL KILL YOU!" before being effortlessly smacked down. Seriously, three characters do the exact same thing over the span of nine pages, politely waiting their turn to fight while everyone stands around looking at them.