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Do you think the Ultimate Marvel universe would make alternate continuity to 616? It would have been like the MCU except even more edgier than the 616 universe.
No one's going to say that Ultimate Fury doesn't look like Sam Jackson, but again, they don't feel like the same character. While Jackson is typical Sam Jackson badass, Ultimate Fury always felt more heartless government agent. He just doesn't have the humanity and the swagger of the real actor.
I kind of wished the Illuminati from Dr. Strange: MoM were comprised of just the Ultimates. It would have been hilarious.
I loved Ultimate X-Men up until Kirkman got involved I think.
I miss the Ultimate Universe. It was fun seeing how things were being reinvented and, since it was all new, it was easy to jump in - which I believe was kind of the point.
How? There's no ambiguity that he's Thor, he's not an environmentalist, he doesn't date Valkyrie. His introductory story is taken more from the 616 version of being sent to Earth as a mortal to learn humility.
Not by that much.Tony acts like 1610's.
Nick and Clint only resemble their Ultimate selves in the most superficial of ways.There's Nick too. And Clint.
Humanity. Right, like when he took Coulson's cards from his locker and soaked them in his blood to motivate the Avengers. Or when he had a crate full of Hydra weapons. Or when he tried to reverse-engineer them to make weapons against Asgardians. Or when he placed Captain America inside a Matrix prototype. Or when he thought that Project Oversight without killings was a great idea. Or when they called Bruce for help, and had a Hulk cage all ready in the Hellicarrier. Or when Carol started to trust him, and he called SHIELD on her back. Or when he kept his mouth shut about the fate of Howard Stark to his son Tony. Or... you get the picture.
Personally, I don't see any failure. They Successfully created a new universe akin to Earth-2 in DC. Populated it and told some very good stories in it. The ONLY thing I see as a failure is killing it off and merging it into the 616. All of that just to get Ultimate Spider-Man and Nick (F'ing) Fury in the 616...
That was what was most impressive. When over in DC they constantly keep referencing multiverses and having Crisis and yet never telling any meanigful stories about those new universes, the Ultimate Universe managed to successfully tell stories without needing to directly connect with the main universe. Ultimate universe made me care about Ultimate Peter Parker.
The obvious big success of the Ultimate Universe is the visual ideas that became adopted in the movies. Nick Fury as Sam Jackson is a total win.
To me the big failure was letting Mark Millar run things after the initial arcs. Once he got through the necessary setup of the different ultimate versions of the teams, he overstayed his welcome. Once we started getting shock value in favor over good storytelling, that began the downfall of the universe.
Ultimate Spider-man was a success pretty much up until Bendis tried his attempt to salvage the Clone Saga story arc. Instead, much like the original, it was a mess that he never seemed to recover from.
Straight up, one of the major failures of the UU was not adjusting to the time period as we moved through two decades. Millar's vision encapsulates the 2000's post 9/11 bleak outlook on reality. I somewhat agree that Ultimatum was necessary to reset the universe but the actual implementation turned it from something that could adjust with the times to just straight refusal by readers to be associated with this alternate universe. Imagine if Ultimatum was good and the UU started developing stories on renewal. However, post-Ultimatum was bleak and really one of the few success post-Ultimatum was Miles. The other titles focused on depression and nihilism which was something already associated with Millar's Ultimate Universe.
I do honestly think that Millar probably wanted the UU to be self-contained and to have an actual ending. That ending being a bleak ending just due to his nihilistic view of realistic Superheros. The point of it all that I could tell is that if there were realistic Superheros, they would be flawed and disgusting. The MCU took a bit of both worlds (616 and 1610) to create a more balanced superhero world.
"Flawed" is one thing, which was what Marvel superheroes were always meant to be compared to DC's, at least when they were first conceived. "Disgusting" is quite another, and where I would agree with you to a point that Ultimate Marvel, at least under Mark Millar, took its "21st-century reimagining" of the Marvel Universe characters perhaps a bit too far.
The spider is always on the hunt.
You make it sound as if being bleak means being of bad quality. It's a genre, not a flaw or virtue.
As for an ending, Millar had nothing to do with Ultimatum. And when he returned he added a subtle fourth-wall joke: the very first scene is Nick Fury watching the damaged Triskelion and saying "I dissapear for ten minutes and the whole place goes to hell". It all makes sense in context (remember that Fury had been exiled to the Squadron Supreme universe before Ultimatum, and returned during it), but it can also be Millar's own reaction to the state of the Ultimate Marvel universe, that he had left in such a high note with the ending of Ultimates 2.