Marvel Ultimate Universe

I did a massive post on this just now, but the board eated it. I'll try and find the time to do it again in a bit.

Current

Ultimate Spider-Man - the main strength is having the same people on it since the start (although that's over now). Lots to love here, I suggest the arcs "Double Trouble", "Public Scrutiny", "Venom", "Cats & Kings", "Hollywood", "Carnage", "Warriors" and "Ultimate Knights" are the picks.

Ultimate X-Men - aka The One I'm Least Bothered About. Maybe it's because I care less about the X-Men period. Anyway, I enjoyed "World Tour", "Return Of The King", "Cry Wolf" and "Magnetic North" the most. The Kirkman stuff that isn't about Cable is fun too.

Ultimate Fantastic Four - suffers from creative changes pretty heavily, plus being almost entirely divergent from received Marvel canon. My picks are "The Fantastic", "Doom", "Crossover", "President Thor" and "Frightful". "Crossover" invents Marvel Zombies.

Ultimate Power - never read Supreme Power, so didn't really care. Tried the first issue, which was meh.

Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk - really great stuff, but #3 (of 6) is 16 months late. Will come out next year, probably, according to a SDCC announcement.

Ultimate Vision - initial mini (now Ultimate Vision #0) was great, but this may have been due to the proximity to Ultimate Galactus. Actual mini is pretty dull, the bits featuring the Vision are pretty good but the bits that want to be Stormwatch aren't.

Complete

The Ultimates - AWESOMES. The best book Marvel were publishing at the time, by some considerable margin.

The Ultimates 2 - Can't match up to v1, but runs it close at times. Probably reads far better in trade than floppies, not least because batshit art direction (8 page splash, anyone) from Millar put Hitch under a fair bit of pressure.

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up - overlooked by most people, this was like Spider-Man's Tangled Web in the Ultimate universe. SEARCH SEARCH SEARCH.

Ultimate Adventures - much better than a book coming out of U DECIDE dereved to be. If you like Alan Moore's First American stuff, you'll love this.

Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra trilogy - the Daredevil and Elektra mini was pretty cute, the romance element is played up really well. The Elektra mini was very poor. No date scheduled for the Daredevil mini.

Ultimate Iron Man - first two issues were meh, the last three were great. Reminding myself of them has me excited for the second mini which is due soon.

Ultimate Galactus trilogy - Nightmare and Secret are both very good, especially the introduction of Mahr Vehl in Secret. Extinction is far too complex for its own good, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you love the first two. Ultimate Vision 0 is technically part of this trilogy.

Ultimate Six - would have been a great US-M arc if it had been there, where it belongs. As a mini, it sort of suffers and it shows that there was an extra issue added during the run.

Ultimate War - Bleh.

Ultimate X4 - DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY. I can barely remember it, even having read the description.

FFS, it even tried to eat that but luckily I learned my lesson and copied it before it got lost.

You're actually repping Ulitmate Adventures & pooing on the 2-part Ultimate X4 thing by Mike Carey & Pascual Ferry? WHA?

I couldn't believe it myself as I was typing it. As I said, even after reading the description I was struggling to remember UX4. Mike Carey has written cack before and Pascual Ferry vs Duncan Fegredo is a pretty tight call.

I bought Ultimate Adventures because of Fegredo (from 50c bins) and it's thoroughly tolerable!

I have never read an Ultimate anything.

I got the first two Ultimate X-Men trades pretty cheap. The first one had a couple of decent moments, but it was kind of like a cover song. I thought the Return to Weapon X one was much better and I thought pretty good. I liked Andy Kubert's art, it is kind of a manga version of Dave Gibbons (if that makes any sense).

I've got the first Ultimate Spider-man on order.

I disliked Ultimate Iron Man because it tried to moralize his drinking (SPOILER)

-- "Oh, he does it to dull the constant pain, much like the suit." I think Card also tried to claim he has some insane alcohol tolerance because of an extended nervous system. Basically, it made a character who was smart and cocky and a dick into a character who was just smart and self-assured.

Could swear there's already a thread on this. oh well. A couple weeks ago, POB gave his state of the union on the Ultiverse here. Some interesting followup by the peanut gallery here.