So, Second Coming has officially started – and with that, so does our regular look at the latest chapter, starting with X-Men: Second Coming #1.

Synopsis: Cable and Hope return to the present. Cyclops mobilises the X-Men to bring them into protection. Attacked by various groups of human zealots, Cable and Hope manage to stay ahead just long enough for the X-Men to arrive and take out their pursuers. In the final pages, it is revealed that the attackers are all members of the “Sapien League”, a group of the X-Men’s deadliest human foes which is being headed by… Bastion!

Mini Review: Not much new information about the story itself, but a lot of action and some surprisingly fantastic artwork from David Finch (even if Hope is drawn slightly too young compared to how she appeared over in Cable recently) add up to a decent beginning for the arc. Yost and Kyle’s grip on X-Men continuity serves this story well, and the setup for future chapters is well-disguised as Cyclops’ own contingency plans. If nothing else, it’s always fun to see the X-Men on top of a situation, doing what they do best, and yet still having time for some nice character moments too.

Commentary

Now, first big point – and call me a nerd if you like – but I really love the trade dress for Second Coming. Part of what I liked about Messiah Complex was the way that all of the issues looked like a continuous series, and that should be the case here, too. The X-Men logo with the extended strike is a nice take on a retro classic that visually references the original X-Factor logo – appropriately so, given the number of X-Factor references in this issue. I like the mix of modern and gothic fonts, and that the colours fit in nicely with Messiah Complex/War as well. Done properly, trade dress can make an event feel special, and that’s definitely the case here – the prominent chapter number indicates that this is going to be a story where every part counts.

In case you’re wondering, these weird grinning robots who show up are members of The Right, a group of mutant-hating X-Factor villains. Or, more accurately, they are members of the new Sapien League, wearing the armour of The Right, as discovered in a crate during the first year of X-Force v3.

The armour is (crudely) designed to counteract mutant powers – specifically, the powers of X-Factor (back when it comprised of the original X-Men). I have no idea what the grinning face design is about, you just have to remember that they were created in the 80s when this sort of thing was considered normal.

On Utopia, Cyclops informs the team that 3 X-Men died as a result of the events of Necrosha. Including Meld, who just died of his injuries. Who is Meld, you might be asking?

Who indeed. A shiny penny to anyone who can actually identify Meld from that line-up without checking first. Namor asks why the hell anyone cares about this Meld person anyway, echoing the voice of the readers, but Cyclops tells him to shut his face, then goes off and has an old-school sulk.

Let’s hope that wasn’t a load-bearing wall. Although this tantrum will potentially harm the resale value of Utopia, it is actually significant that he goes this far, because it suggests that the precarious situation of leading all mutantkind – not entirely successfully – is actually starting to get to the normally stoic and repressed Cyclops.

Now, here’s a mystery. Why isn’t Hope showing up on Cerebra? Can she somehow mask herself? Has Cable masked her already? Cerebra detected her mutant signature the moment Hope was born – so why not now? I’m pretty sure her powers have already manifested, after all, even if she isn’t well-practised in using them. And furthermore, how does Cyclops know that Hope is in the present too? Is it, perhaps, due to the psychic rapport he used to share with a certain redhead that Hope may or may not be the reincarnation of? Or is he just making a leap of faith?

Following this discovery, Cyclops breaks the team up into squads. It’s not clear why Domino and Vanisher have been sent to San Francisco. Rogue and Namor are left to protect Utopia – with Cyclops making an amusing appeal to Namor’s vanity – while the New Mutants are put in the sky, sans Magik, for similarly vague reasons. Cyclops himself takes his “Alpha Roster”, which is a frankly awesome team comprising Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Angel, Psylocke, X-23, Magik, Pixie and Cyclops himself. I love a good custom X-Men squad, and with three teleporters and lots of combat prowess, it seems well-suited for an extraction.

Meanwhile, Cable and Hope are still fighting. Cable notices that The Right armour is “ahead of its time.” Solicitations suggest that there’s going to be a time-travel component to Second Coming, but it may also suggest that the new Sapien League has been harvesting technology from Bastion’s “Nimrod” components.

The guys in the weird face-masks are members of the Sapien League, who first appeared in 2004 and were recently led by the Leper Queen. Apparently, when you’re out of flying robot suits with buit-in guns and stuff, your next option is a van and hockey mask. But they do get sniper rifles too. While they attempt to chase down Hope and Cable, the X-Men teleport in and slice up the Sapien League good, much to Nightcrawler’s moral outrage. Cyclops and Wolverine also spend a lot of time trying to hush up the various members of X-Force from discussing their secret black-ops missions in front of people who aren’t supposed to know about it.

Wolverine tries to find out how they were tracking Cable and Hope, and the next scene apparently reveals the answer. The new Sapien League had a video camera pointed at the mansion ruins. Probably not such a bad idea, all things considered. It also reveals the villains for Second Coming - a bunch of Human X-Men villains who have finally pooled their resources. Makes sense, really, given that the “faceless anti-mutant zealots” has been the mandate for a fair proportion of “different” anti-mutant organisations over the years. For those who are interested, it’s Cameron Hodge (demonically-immortal leader of The Right), Steven Lang (ex-Phalanx), Bolivar Trask (Sentinel creator), William Stryker (Purifiers), Graydon Creed (Friends of Humanity) and Bastion (Past-Mastermold, Part-Nimrod, All-Operation: Zero Tolerance). It’s like a 80s/90s villain reunion, and a feast for continuity geeks. Though, in case you hadn’t noticed, a lot of the villains in this story have recently appeared in Kyle/Yost’s X-Force run.

Oh, and just because they apparently haven’t used the word Messiah enough to justify the title of this crossover, Bastion appears here, crucified. Subtle.

Predictionwatch

In which I catch up with some of the predictions I made in Chapter Zero of this article series.

Phoenixwatch: Nothing about Phoenix so far. There’s the barest subtextual hint that Cyclops’ psychic link with Jean might be what makes him so sure that Hope is alive, but it could easily be nothing more than faith in his son.

Nightcrawlerwatch: Kurt seems oddly prominent in this issue, and gets to give the kind of speech that’s going to seem pretty ironic if he does die. His moral outrage at X-23′s murder of a Sapien League member is also a fairly major plot beat that suggests he may shortly develop some disillusionment with the Cyclops’ leadership skills. The fact that he has more lines than pretty much everyone except Cable, Hope and Cyclops suggests that he is going to be a major part of the next few issues – one way or the other.

So, Part One over. Everyone back here next week for a look at Uncanny X-Men #523!

It may surprise you to learn this, but we critics don’t always take pleasure in bad reviews. Oh sure, it can be entertaining both to read and to write a damned good kicking, but sometimes you come across something so utterly lamentable that its wretchedness goes far, far beyond amusing – and into the realms of wondering how anyone, anywhere that describes themselves as “professional” could think that it was a product worth asking people to pay money for. Ultimatum is just such a comic.

There’s no joy in tearing Ultimatum down, because it cannot be enjoyed in even the most car-crash-esque, can’t-look-away-because-I’m-morbidly-curious manner (indeed, its very existence makes one appreciate how Ultimates 3 was at least possible to read on that level). It is, simply, a deeply unpleasant comic, with no grasp of how to tell a story – and, indeed, no story to tell even if it were somehow capable of engaging the reader – and a bloody-minded determination to do nothing other than destroy, destroy and destroy a carefully constructed fictional world and set of characters. Its only end result is to make one despair for the industry that produced it.

It’s not even as if it successfully deploys a big “event” to irrevocably change the Ultimate Universe (which is the one thing that it actually promised to do). The only major, world-affecting incident occurred in the first issue – everything that has happened since then has been a simple roll call of characters stepping up to be killed off one by one. There’s absolutely no tension or drama in the confrontation between Magneto and the world’s heroes – and everything that occurs feels like a retread of something that’s been done better, whether it’s Millar’s “Return of the King” storyline in this very Universe, or a moment that’s presumably supposed to be shocking but will simply feel achingly familiar to anyone who’s read X-Men #25 (and a lot of people bought that book – even I’ve read it).

Characters act with little regard for established traits (in one instance, performing a stunning about-face in order to become a cold-blooded executioner), or indeed for established logic (anyone who can explain to me just how Magneto is able to control Tony Stark’s palm beams, AND stop Scott Summers from closing his own eyes, will get a massive prize). And as if to emphasize the fact that there really is no actual coherent, planned plot to all of this (beyond “He kills him so he kills him so he kills him repeat ad nauseam”), Loeb pulls exactly the same “trick” as at the end of Ultimates 3, by having a previously unconnected character turn out to be apparently responsible for everything (while simultaneously rendering the role of the supposed instigator of the previous series’ events even less than pointless – seriously, what did Doctor Doom have to do with ANY of this?). It’s actually quite ridiculous – the unforeshadowed (and note that I’m not referring to stories that actually carefully plant their seeds, hello Xorn) “ta-da! I was behind it all along!” reveal is surely something that most storytellers grow out of by the age of… ooh, seven? But not Loeb. He’s unique among his peers, I’ll give him that.

As far as I can see, the only way that the Ultimate Universe has been significantly changed by all of this is that there are a lot fewer mutants around (and, as such, there probably won’t be an X-Men book – at least, certainly not one with any characters worth reading about). Oh, and Thor is dead. At least, I think Thor is dead. Good luck finding any closure on his – or indeed most people’s – storyline in these pages, though. And it says a lot for Ultimatum‘s ability to get worse by the issue that there are moments even more gratuitously gruesome than the infamous “Wasp bowel chomping” incident.

I’ve already wasted far more energy than is in any way necessary on this dismal, pathetic excuse for entertainment. But then, picking up and turning the pages of this issue is expending more energy than it deserves. I hesitate to stray too far into hyperbole (actually, that’s bollocks – I always stray too far into hyperbole), but it’s very possible that mainstream superhero comics have reached an absolute nadir with this series. It’s almost enough to make me want to go back to Maximum Clonage…

What is there that’s left to say about Ultimatum? My opinion of the comic can be summed up in two words: It’s bad. Or, if you like: REALLY Bad. But then, you knew that, right? No-one with an ounce of sense could possibly be under the delusion that it’s anything other than terrible. Frankly, if you like this comic, and you are not Jeph Loeb and not related to Jeph Loeb, then you have no excuse for any other opinion.

The thing is, after 4 issues of this utter, utter garbage, I’m far beyond hating it. I no longer have the energy. And these are the reasons why:

1. Loeb barely acknowledges that the Ultimate Universe exists. The Ultimate Hulk is acting like the Marvel Universe Hulk. Ultimate Dr. Strange is acting like the Marvel Universe Dr. Strange. Does he even know what he’s writing? He certainly doesn’t seem to care about it, after all.

2. Angel dies. Doctor Strange dies. Both suffer a gory and gratuitous on-panel death. The Ultimate version of Strange was barely established, and now he’s dead. Are we supposed to care? What’s the point? Spider-Man also “dies”, and aside from the fact that the Kitty is shown discovering Peter’s mask in scenes that contradict Ultimate Spider-Man, the differences in the quality of the writing on the Ultimate titles becomes starkly evident. Bendis devotes a silent issue devoted to showing the tragic loss inflicted by Spidey’s “death”. Loeb has Wolverine turn up and go “SPIDER-MAN IS DEAD?” in about the least elegant possible way. I’m aware the contexts are different, but really, this level of subtlety would insult B-movie writers.

3. Ultimate Nick Fury uses the word “bungholes.” I’m going to spell that for you just to emphasis how stupid it is. B-U-N-G-H-O-L-E-S.

4. Magneto gets his arm cut off. Not only is he somehow unable to prevent this, despite the fact it’s done with a METAL sword, but he manages to keep fighting and delivering biblical monologues afterwards.

Reading a comic like this doesn’t just upset me. It causes me to lose all faith in the industry. Children’s cartoons are written with more care and attention than this. You could take the most gibbering, ridiculous fanboy off the Internet and have them write up their most demented Jubilee Vs. Galactus fantasy script and you’d come up with a better story than this. And yet Marvel are not only paying Loeb to write this, they’re actually allowing it to be drawn and sold as a real comic. Why? Why?

The real question is – who’s buying this? I know I didn’t. Is it you? Is it one of your friends? And if so, why? Why do you hate comics? Ultimatum is, without any hyperbole, one of the worst comics I’ve ever read – and the only reason it’s not the worst is because Loeb also wrote Ultimates 3 and Onslaught Reborn and somehow, they manage to be slightly worse.

You might be surprised to learn that here are Comics Daily, we don’t take any pleasure in reading a bad comic. Far from it. If it seems like we’re having fun when we rip apart a particularly horrible issue, it’s because we’re taking pleasure not in how bad the comic is, but in the idea we might be able to prevent other people from having to discover for themselves. Every time someone is convinced not to buy a bad comic by a well-written review, the whole industry takes another tiny step towards getting better.

If I do my job correctly, by the end of this review, the comics industry will have just gotten a little better. As a reviewer and a fan, I’m smart enough to tell the difference between a comic that I don’t like, and a comic that is badly written. Ultimatum falls firmly into the latter camp.

In the opening sequence, every character refers to the other by name in a stilted, unnatural fashion. This is an attempt at exposition. Maybe writing for TV has confused Loeb, but in comics, there’s absolutely no need for sentences as clunky as “At your age, Johnny, your sister Susan was already…”. I mean, think about it. Johnny already KNOWS Susan is his sister, so why say it? In comics, there are a variety of devices designed to deliver information. Caption boxes, for example. Or even visuals! A photograph in the panel showing “Johnny and Sue” as children. Hell, put a family tree on the recap page if you really, honestly think that anyone buying Ultimatum will need reminding that Johnny and Sue are siblings.

But no. Instead, Loeb chooses page after page of wilting, expositionary dialogue where everyone labours to include the name of the person they’re talking to. I understand what’s going on, I really do. The idea is to set the scene, remind readers who everyone is, and how they relate to one another. I’m just not sure why it had to be done in such a painfully prosaic and literal way.

Another way Ultimatum fails is that even the logical content of its exposition fails to be convincing. Dazzler tells Angel that of the 4 of them (Beast, Angel, Dazzler and Nightcrawler) he is the most “passable.” As in, can pass for human. The problem is, looking at the lineup, only Nightcrawler is visibly a mutant. In fact, if you stripped them naked, Dazzler is the only one of the 4 who WOULDN’T be recognisably mutant, and that’s assuming you attribute Beast’s large hands and feet to mutantcy, which is a stretch. The reason Dazzler is clearly a mutant? Well, she has lots of tattoos and piercings!

Except, from looking at the artwork, SHE DOESN’T. At best, you can see 4 earrings, an eyebrow ring and a tattoo on her wrist. That’s not even enough to make most people blink twice. Now again, this is where comic technique comes in. I could perhaps buy Beast and Dazzler claiming they look less “human” than Warren… as long as it did actually LOOK that way. But it doesn’t. The art and dialogue have failed to synchronise, as they repeatedly do. The “teenaged adventurers” in the Fantastic Four are drawn like buff, mid-20s athletes. Ultimate Spider-Man’s physique completely changes once he gets into costume. Everyone keeps mentioning “all the dead bodies” but the reader sees nothing.

And still there’s more. Loeb’s “characterisation” from Ultimates once again rears its ugly head, with characters are reduced to one note stereotypes. Valkyrie is sex-obsessed. Iron Man is alcohol-obsessed. Cap is, in a development ripped from the pages of the Ultimate Cap Annual, inexplicably Wasp-obsessed, even though that wasn’t remotely touched on in Ultimates 3, which occurs BETWEEN this story and that one.

Even the continuity is fried. Thor talks like Stan Lee’s “King James” Thor even though only Loeb himself ever had him do that. Hawkeye somehow feels the need to mention that Hank shot Jan with ant spray as if it were an important, recent event rather than a minor thread in the tapestry of their relationship that happened well over a year ago, chronologically. Magneto is using his floating base from the early days of Ultimate X-Men – presumably they just left it there while he was incarcerated?

You could just… you could really go on and on about all the ways in which this comic is bad. It’s a complete mess. It has its moments – to its credit, it does feel like big events are happening and that the ramifications will be far-reaching, but the thing about any fiction is, if you’re only involved so you can find out “What happens next?” then you really shouldn’t be involved at all. it’s not “Ultimates” bad, but it’s still far, far from being worth reading.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Secret Invasion has finally kicked off, and if we’re to believe the hype, Bendis has had it in the works as far back as Secret War and Avengers Disassembled. Not too shabby, and if true, represents long-term planning that would impress even the writers of Lost.

With this in mind, I thought it’d be a good idea to use this week’s Dusting Off to go back and have a look at the place where Bendis claims he explicitly started identifying Skrull infiltrators to Tom Brevoort – the first arc of New Avengers, and give ourselves a refresher course. After all, the cover to Secret Invasion #1 is a homage to the cover of New Avengers #1. There’s got to be some link, right?

In the first issue, someone hires Electro to break out a bunch of prisoners from the Raft, and a group of heroes who are visiting the Sentry get caught in the midst. During the battle, over 40 villains escape, but a similar number are held back by the assembled heroes. As a result, they accidentally form what Captain America calls the “new” Avengers – Iron Man, Cap, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Luke Cage and later, the Sentry, with Wolverine joining a few issues later.

As an opening issue, it’s a fairly simple, iconic story of heroes overcoming the odds, and that’s what makes Captain America decide to re-form the Avengers team. However, we now know that the issue, and the rest of the arc, have Skrulls in it, pulling the strings. All will certainly be revealed in time, but for those of us who can’t wait, let’s see what we can figure out…

The most obvious wildcard in this story is the shadowy man in a trenchcoat that hires Electro to break into the Raft. To this day, we don’t know who it was. However, in that opening scene, Electro has some very deep, obvious green eyes. That’s been shorthand for “this person is a skrull” for some time. Is Electro one of the earliest confirmed skrulls? He’s done little of prominence recently, but that does suggest that the people freeing Lykos are Skrulls, and therefore you could assume the shadowy figure is too.

Thing is… that shadowy figure does look a lot like Nick Fury, from what we see of him. It’d also explain why we haven’t seen who it is even 3 years down the line – Fury’s still in hiding. There’s more going on it that it seems, of course. If it is Fury who hired Electro, he did so to break out Sauron, which pointed the New Avengers in the direction of SHIELD’s questionable activities in the Savage Land – something Fury would want to do now that he’s on the outs with the organisation. Maria Hill destroyed the SHIELD unit mining Savage Land Vibranium when the Avengers found out. If that shadowy figure is Fury, then all this also points to Maria Hill being a skrull – not an unpopular or particularly original theory, but one that, on re-reading New Avengers’ opening arc, could have some weight behind it.

Yikes. Two possible contradictory theories and we’re only one issue in. The clues allegedly start New Avengers #1, so why not have a read and see what you can find out?