Ultimate End #4 (2015)
by Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley
Before we get to the ending of Secret Wars, let’s move back a little to one of the surprisingly less discussed parts of the crossover: the ending of the original Ultimate Universe.
Before talking about the issue itself, a necessary tangent.
On a purely technical level, the original Ultimate Universe was already destroyed at the beginning of Secret Wars.
This miniseries is set on a newly created version of New York that somehow contains copies of BOTH the original “Earth 616” versions of the characters AND their Ultimate counterparts.
Yeah, uhm, I stopped following the Ultimate universe several years before this and I’m not gonna lie, I’m not understanding any of this.
The fact that this has Bendis fingerprints all over the place does not help, AT ALL.
Because either characters don’t explain anything or, when they do, it’s with Bendis dialogue.
Getting to the actual story, thankfully for my sanity not a whole lot relates to Doctor Doom so I can skip most of it.
Outside of the main miniseries this is not an easy crossover to follow to begin with, and this miniseries makes things even worse by having doppelgangers of TWO prior universe.
The important thing is that there’s a lot of Big Dumb Fights going on in the background.
Things are so out of control that even God Emperor Doom is involved.
That’s because two different versions of Tony Stark and Ultimate Bruce Banner (I think?) have figured out a way to leave their dimension.
Yeah who could have predicted that creating a city stuffed with the entire superhero population of TWO universes might backfire?
Doctor Doom doesn’t have much to say here.
As you might have guessed by how much I’m skipping, I’m not exactly a fan of this miniseries.
But I do have to praise Mark Bagley’s artwork: just look and how much he manages to sell Valeria’s emotions with a single panel!
I’m a huge Bagley fan; one of the few things I regret about dropping the original Ultimate Spider-Man run is that I missed a ton of his artwork.
Doom is perfectly fine with the last piece of the Ultimate Universe to do destroy itself… it’s even implied he specifically created this pocket reality for that purpose… but Valeria is worried he might have missed something.
Naah, that would require the Ultimate Universe to introduce a character popular enough to be the only thing worth saving from that reality, and what are the chances of THAT happening?
Ultimate End #5 (2015)
by Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley
All the Ultimate characters make their exit, with the exception of Spider-Man that hangs around.
I unironically love this cover.
Miles is the one trying to knock some sense into the other heroes by stopping their pointless fight.
Instead of letting Miles explain himself, Emma Frost is going to transmit his memories into everyone’s mind.
Hey, anything to limit the amount of Bendis dialogue I have to stomach.
So apparently Doom really DID create this pocket reality filled with the old heroes… just to torture them? I don’t know, it doesn’t strike me as a Doctor Doom thing.
Don’t get me wrong, he DEFINITELY is petty enough to create a place where he can torture people who antagonized or mildly inconvenienced him… even after he made himself God Emperor…
… but WITHOUT TELLING THEM IT’S THE WORK OF DOOM!?!?
Not to mention this goes COMPLETELY against Doom’s insistence in the rest of the event to make everyone worship him directly.
Bendis is a complete mystery for me.
This is the same guy who is misunderstanding Doom here and who completely butchered his dialogue before… and yet once Secret Wars is over he’s going to write a very compelling Doom for a while (before he ruins it in the finale, because Bendis).
I completely forgot nearly everything that happened in this comic except this double page spread with a very dense grid of reactions by characters from both universes.
Specifically, I remember how bad it is.
Here’s a sample of why.
To be fair, there are a couple of genuine reactions.
Miles came with a plan, but there’s a problem: everyone else in the Ultimate Universe is too dumb to follow.
Everyone is convinced when a very old Wolverine vouches for the kid.
This is a microcosm of why I dropped the Ultimate Universe: a bunch of characters standing around and talking over each other without actually doing anything.
This happens.
MULTIPLE.
TIMES.
But eventually, ALL the heroes launch a massive attack against Doom.
That follows is a sequence that is a neat idea IN THEORY but atrocious in the execution.
It’s several montages in a row of Ultimate characters that disappear throughout multiple pages.
I have several problems with this. The first time is that these are THE SAME EXACT FACES of the previous montage, meaning we are duplicating a double splash page.
TWICE.
IN A ROW.
Followed with a double page spread that has only 4 panels.
I’m just leaving the outside border for clarity, by the way, the rest of the page is just blank.
That’s already bad enough, but it’s followed by TWO WHOLE BLANK PAGES.
As a positive, it does have the best dialogue of the whole miniseries.
Then Miles wakes up in a new reality where his mother is alive.
She was dead in the original Ultimate Universe.
So, uhm, this is the regular Marvel Universe that *spoiler alert* will be fully recreated at the end of Secret Wars.
It just has Miles Morales in it.
Doom significance: 0/10
He barely shows up. And good thing, because this doesn’t make any sense with the rest of the event.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not a chance.
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
Oh boy.
I wasn’t a fan of the original Ultimate Universe, but… it DID last for fifteen years, so you might have expected at least SOME respect for its last story (especially since Bendis was one of the main writers of the imprint).
Even if it was abundantly clear that the sole reason anyone bothered to give SOME kind of ending is because Miles was WAY more popular than anything else in his universe at this point, so they HAD to bring him over to the main universe SOMEHOW.
By the end of this, besides Miles and his supporting cast, the only Ultimate character to survive was Ultimate Reed Richards who had become The Maker.
I won’t go into the specifics, but the new version of the Ultimate Universe that at the time of this writing is going on is also linked to The Maker.
In hindsight, it’s hard to remember that the Ultimate Universe was so popular that there was regular speculation that Marvel would some day just cancel its original titles and make the Ultimate version the main one.
Fast-forward to 2025 and Ultimate Spider-Man is currently selling more than regular Spider-Man, to the point there’s regular speculation that Marvel might some day cancel the original title and make Ultimate Spider-Man the main one.
Some things never change, including the fandom having the memory of a goldfish and Marvel screwing over Spider-Man.
But at least we don’t have Bendis writing, so that’s a plus.
Also:
I really should parody that panel more often.