To put Hulk and Ultimates 3 out on the same day once may be regarded as a misfortune. To do it twice looks like carelessness. Yes, almost three months after the inaugural Jeph Loeb Day, Marvel have managed to do it again. Amazingly, though, this ploy actually works in favour of Ultimates - because finally, with its last issue, it manages to rise ever-so-slightly out of “worst comic ever” territory, and into the heady heights of “pretty bloody rotten”; and in doing so, actually avoids being the worst title of the week thanks to its bigger, uglier, stupider cousin.

Of course, not for a minute am I suggesting that Ultimates 3 has in any way managed to redeem its pitiful existence at the final hurdle. In fact, the attempts that Loeb makes in this issue to show people that yes, look, he really did read the Millar/Hitch series are actually even more offensive, because - from the hitherto-unemployed device of flashbacks to that series, to newly-minted rapist Pyro acknowledging that he “was in the X-Men once” - they’ve clearly just been thrown in at the last minute to deflect further criticism. That is, unless Loeb really does want us to believe that he structured the plot of an entire series around a single throwaway gag that Millar made in volume two. I’m not kidding - that’s where the motivations for all of Ultimates 3’s events spin out of.

So despite the fact that Loeb does at least bother to clean up the series’ underlying “mystery” (which is more than can be said for Hulk), and despite the fact that there aren’t anywhere near as many instances of excruciating dialogue or proto-adolescent attempts at “adult” “edginess” (just two that I counted - an awful, awful pun from Hank Pym that once again relies on knowing what the @$&! substitution means, thus defeating the point of even using it; and a gratuitous and brutal decapitation-and-whatever-the-word-is-for-chopping-hands-off sequence), this is still woefully misguided stuff. We get a “big reveal” that I imagine was supposed to be a surprise, but which simply makes us laugh at the fact that Loeb thought it would be a surprise; we have a continuation of the complete absence of any understandable character motivations; we have sloppy storytelling from Joe Mad that at one point sees a complete collapse in any kind of sequential progression; we have Janet Pym thinking she’s somehow authorised to override the US Government by allowing Hank Pym to be freed from house arrest for all that murder and terrorism to which he was an accessory; and despite the fact that the story ostensibly “ends” (rather surprisingly, actually - I expected a “To Be Continued In Ultimatum” blurb), there’s suddenly a massive “revelation” at the end that simply goes against all established rules of storytelling (because not once was it ever hinted at before - and that’s simply not playing fair).

In fact, I actually enjoyed the series more when it was one of the worst things I’d ever read - because the first few issues were incredibly easy to laugh at. But this… this is just lame. It’s badly-thought out, badly-told rubbish, and a waste of everybody’s time. “Disaster” is a word that’s probably overused in the hyperbolic circles of online comics criticism - but in using one of the most revered and groundbreaking superhero properties of recent years to tell a juvenile, simplistic and ultimately rather pointless tale, without showing any kind of interest in maintaining consistency in style, continuity or character, a disaster is exactly what Loeb has created. It won’t be missed.

Tags: Jeph Loeb, Joe Madureira, Ultimates
Publisher: Marvel