Source: peter-bonnell.wordpress.com

4. Ultimatum

Oh hang on, we’re talking about the Ultimate Universe now, so you might want to turn up your monitor brightness, because it’s about to get unnecessarily dark and grim in here.

I love Ultimate Spider-Man like a childhood friend, but the rest of the line never really found its footing. And Ultimatum, its attempt to branch out in a new direction, did in fact accomplish its goal. Unfortunately, the new direction it headed in was a downhill slide into unreadability.

Essentially, the premise is that there’s a big disaster and the heroes have to find out how to stop it and who’s causing it. Sorry, that’s a lie. That’s the “story”, the premise seems to be that it’s a challenge to see how many characters they can violently kill off in five issues. Wasp gets eaten, Doom’s head is crushed, Wolverine is ripped apart, Magneto is decapitated, Daredevil drowns, Doctor Strange has his skull popped like a gusher…the list drags on and on. Wikipedia officially lists 35 deaths in the five-issue series.

That’s just wasteful. And it’s so grimdark, you’d think it was fanfic written by a suburban teenager with his quill pen while listening to 2000s pop punk if it didn’t have the Marvel seal on the cover. Dreary, self important, and altogether unnecessary.