Customer Reviews

Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch? (Ultimates (Marvel Paperback)) (v. 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Maybe instead of being titled "Who Killed The Scarlet Witch, ULTIMATES 3 should have been titled "Who Killed Jeph Loeb's Career?" Loeb was responsible for some damned good books at one point, including CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN, BATMAN: DARK VICTORY, and SUPERMAN: FOR ALL SEASONS, as well as a slew of others. His more recent output, of which ULTIMATES 3 is a prime example, resembles work done by someone who has suffered some form of massive Brain trauma........

The story, such as it is, is this:
The Scarlet Witch gets killed. The Ultimates fight a lot of people.

Along the way we get:
Valkyrie, a formerly powerless teen groupie, now Thor's lover, complete with Thor-level powers that no one thinks to ask how she acquired.Which is OK, because the reader is never told, either......
Black Panther is an Ultimate, despite the fact the he never speaks, and NONE OF THE ULTIMATES HAVE A CLUE WHO HE IS! (These guys have really lowered the entrance criteria.....)
Hawkeye has a death-wish, and acts like a tool. Wait, everyone in the book acts like a tool......
A pointless Spider-Man appearance that adds nothing, yet takes up seven pages.
A trip to the Savage Land, complete with Ka-Zar and Shanna, who appear for no reason and serve no purpose.
A mystery with the most retarded solution possible.
A totally out-of-left-field final page that almost made me LITERALLY scratch my head.
Classic dialogue such as "SUCK IT!", "Come with me if you want to live!", and "Then I guess that makes ME the MOTHER-%#&*(*!!!". Truly worthy of the Emmy and Eisner Awards Loeb has somehow won.......
Incest!
Attempted rape!
A Superhero sex tape, complete with a "How the hell did THAT get past the Editor???" implied Fellatio scene.

As I said above, the revelation of the murderer is just retarded. And that's the best word to describe this book.
Retarded. It's bad, HIDEOUSLY bad, in fact. Loeb needs to go back to TV, and give comic-books a rest. Maybe he's burned out or something, but this is beyond sub-par work. It's SUB-sub-par. Awful.

On the plus side, the art and coloring (By Joe Madureira and Christian Lichtner, respectively) are nice, but there are WAAAAY too many splash pages, compounding the fact that there's not much story here to begin with. ULTIMATES 3 took me about a half-hour to read, including a lot of time for lingering over the illustrations.

The collection includes all of the original covers and variants (Except the white-background Black Panther cover for issue #1), and has a nice gatefold section in the back, showcasing the six-panel gatefold cover from ULTIMATES 3 #1, and the two three-panel gatefold covers from ULTIMATES 3 #5. That's hardly a justification for the collection costing a whopping FIVE DOLLARS more than the original issues did. Save your money for Mark Millar's ULTIMATE AVENGERS, and do what most comic-fans are doing: Pretend ULTIMATES 3 and ULTIMATUM never happened......

Good lord, this was a terrible comic book. The story was essentially gibberish - a series of hop-skip-jump connected vignettes, each designed to show off a bustacular splash page and some 'cinematic' violence that made very little sense.

The continuity was rubbish - this was something out of the Chris Claremont school of cross-over action; unless you've read sixteen other, parallel, simultaneous titles, there's no sense to be made. On top of that, this was over-the-top mayhem, with no grounding in the real world, no maturity to the plotline, no sense of adulthood, drama, character development, cleverness or even the vaguest whiff of accomplishing something new.

Ultimates 3 was, in fact, everything that the Ultimates universe was originally created to avoid. This may not be the first nail in the Ultimate coffin, but it certainly is the longest.

After reading review after review bashing Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira's Ultimates 3, I decided I had to see for myself whether anything these two creators - whose work I've greatly enjoyed in the past - could truly be worth all the 1-star ratings. I wondered if people really took into account that Loeb and Madureira had the unenviable task of following up two of the greatest comic sagas ever published. After The Ultimates, Vol. 1 and The Ultimates 2 (v. 2), just about anything was going to be a let down. Well, I just finished Ultimates 3 and have to concede that the critics were right. The only way I can describe the change in quality is like going from a Quentin Tarantino film to a cartoon produced by Jerry Bruckheimer's less-talented (now there's a scary thought) half-brother.

The set up for this series is pretty simple. The Scarlet Witch is assassinated in the first issue, royally ticking off her father Magneto and prompting the Ultimates to go off to the Savage Land. Wolverine shows up, as do Ka-Zar, Spider-Man and Venom. Why? Wolverine is given an exceedingly lame reason for being there, but I can only figure the rest were thrown in because Joe Madureira wanted to draw them. Along with a convoluted "plot" involving a suicidal Hawkeye, a Black Panther shrouded in mystery (a stupid mystery, but a mystery nonetheless), dinosaurs and evil robots, Loeb employs inane dialogue, one-dimensional characters and a plot so convoluted that by the supposed cliffhanger at the finale, I just couldn't bring myself to care if (or how) everything was resolved.

I really have no idea what was going through Jeph Loeb's mind when he wrote this monstrosity. Maybe he was tired of the awards and critical acclamation he received from stories like Batman: The Long Halloween and the Heroes TV series and wanted to get back to the mindless, Image style superhero slugfests he penned in the 90's. If he set out to radically change the status quo of the Ultimates, he definitely succeeded. Unfortunately for him, the status quo was absolute perfection.

Now I have to give Joe Madureira credit for his artwork here. I adored his manga-influenced pencils back in the 90's, and it's great to see him working in comics again. His characters are vibrant and stylized, and are really the only alternative to Bryan Hitch's cinematic realism. I'm not crazy about the coloring technique used here, since it makes every page look obscured by fog, but by and large the artwork is the book's only redeeming virtue.

There is a certain train wreck quality to Ultimates 3 that makes it hard not to gawk at, and there are a lot of pretty pictures. Other than that, though, reading Ultimates 3 is like watching a brilliant new institution being dismantled one page at a time. Sadly, Loeb has been given even more Ultimate Universe stories, so the damage is unlikely to be contained to just this volume. What a shame.

A few years ago, if you would've told me that the attrocius writing of Jeph Loeb(The Ultimates 3, Ultimatum) and Robert Kirkman(Ultimate X-Men) would bring ruin to the Ultimate universe, I wouldn't have believed you. I would've expected hell to freeze over before both of those guys dropped consecutive turds. Not in a million years did I think the guy who wrote some of the quintessential Batman stories like Hush, The Long Halloween, and Dark Victory, and the guy who brought us The Walking Dead, and Invincible could've ruined an entire universe. But, I was wrong, becuase that's just what happened. This is what happens when guys have too many projects going on at one time(Loeb is doing TV and comics, while at the time Kirkman was pumping out The Walking Dead, and Invincible, two creator owned books that he obviously cared more about); they don't have time to really put forth the effort on all of their various projects, so some of them suffer. Maybe the editors at Marvel should make sure these guys aren't stretching themselves too thin, before they're allowed to headline two best-selling franchises and drive them into the mud, taking Ultimate Spider-Man with them. I'm forgetting Ultimate Fantastic Four...but that's because it's Ultimately forgettable.

True, Bendis writes a lot of books simultaneously, but he's an exception, not the rule.

The execution of this story is ridiculous and an insult to the Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch run, which gave us some of the best story telling in all of Marvel. Nothing...not even this (or Red Hulk)... can destroy the great stories Jeph Loeb has given comic fans in the past, the list goes on and on. However if this is his vision of what to write I'd appreciate Marvel putting a story like this is a self contained limited series that doesn't have affect on a regular series' continuity.

Story aside, I happen to like the look of the art in this book, but even that can't make me give it any more stars.

Might contain ::SPOILERS::
The overall story is obviously The Scarlet Witch is shot and the Ultimates are on a mission to find out who. Then end up in the savage land, not really sure why, and after a lot of forced sexual innuendos and foul language there's the big reveal that it's a certain robot villian whom we all know and love to hate. And he's got an army of robot imposters posing as original heroes.

Damn it all! If you showed Mark Millar an overall outline of this story we might've gotten something brillant. Like a Terminator style war against the Ultimates full of suspicion and intrigue! But no!!! We get every character we ever liked turned into the angriest most unlikable cast of characters ever! I didn't just hate the book, I hated every character too, and that stinks. The book is so fast paced I found myself confused and saying "why!?" in anger at almost every page turn. I don't know how they can possibly turn this series around since future creative teams on Ultimates 4 will surely have to acknowledge this steaming pile of garbage.

I know sometimes negative reviews actually peak your interest to read a book, that's why I read this, I wanted to see just how bad it was. If you're like me then please just find a way to read it without buying it, I'm very glad I didn't buy this, since I would never ever pick it up again.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two Ultimates series, so when I heard that Jeph Loeb was writing the third, I was excited. Unfortunately, his contribution to this project is the worst part. I honestly don't think he, A)read any Ultimate universe comics, and B) gave a crap about the Ultimate universe. Millar and Bendis went to great lengths to separate the Ultimate universe from the regular Marvel universe. Well Jeph Loeb thought he knew better. Now instead of a fresh, modern take on Thor, its back to the old "thee and thou" Thor, complete with his old stone hammer. The worst part is that Loeb makes these changes with little to no explanation, which is pretty insulting. The dialogue is laughable, with Sabertooth telling Captain America to "suck it" and Ironman making lame jokes and Wasp cheering him on by saying "You go, Tony!". Lame.

The strongest part of the series is the art. Joe Madureira was a very odd choice to draw this series, since the original series were drawn in a very realistic style by Bryan Hitch, and Madureira draws in a cartoony anime style. I can live with the change in styles, but his style didn't serve the realistic theme of the Ultimates. That being said, purely from the art angle, this book is gorgeous. The art is so good in fact that it got two more stars out of me, finishing out with 3 stars.

Bottom line: fans of the first two series won't enjoy the writing here. A huge step back was taken here, go pick up Ultimate Avengers, Mark Millar is back and repairing the damage done by Loeb. If you are a fan of pretty pictures and not worried about story, buy this book right now, it won't disappoint.

Abandoning any threads dangling from Millar, Loeb does his own crappy stuff, then does Ultimatum, and all the guys he kills off there are promptly re-introduced as new characters by Millar. This crap is to be avoided entirely.

As a long time Marvel fan, I migrated to the Ultimates more and more during House of M, giving up on the entire core universe after Civil War. While some decisions on characters in Ultimates I and II bothered me, they were at least consistent, and the overall storylines were enjoyable.

However, that apparently happened in an entirely separate universe from Ultimates III. Half of the characters, such as Thor, Valkyrie, and many others, bore absolutely no resemblance to their original Ultimates "selves". The other half were damaged, with flawed characterisation and no sense of history. The 'villain behind the villain' does not even resemble his Ultimates version-- who is not even in the Ultimates dimension at the time of this story! (though he might have returned, the complete change to him does not make sense). Multiple characters who have been brought in prior to this story are treated as though they were completely new-- and cardboard.

Even considered as a work on its own, it is terrible. The characters range from flat and boring to utterly incomprenhensible, the storyline is confused and self-contradictory, and the dialogue utterly banal. The art looks traced and inhuman, with the proportions all wrong and the male characters especially looking plastic. If you like Ultimates, buy Ultimate Spider-Man books. Don't waste your money on this garbage.

Why is Jeph Loeb so determined to destroy the ultimate universe? Someone needs to fire this guy, I could write a better comic and I am mentally retarded.

The story simply never made sense. I never knew what was going on, or why new characters had appeared. Existing characters were changed beyond recognition in defiance of all psychology - for example, suddenly hawkeye is whiny emo hawkeye, and completely unlikeable. This would be a terrible comic on its own, but it stands next to the superb Ultimates 1 and 2 for comparison. Do not buy the book. You'll be glad you did not.