Cataclysm - Ultimate X-Men 2
Fialkov (w) and A. Martinez and J. Lucas (a) and Bellaire (c)
Rick Jones showed up in the nick of time to explain some things and Mach Two, with the help of Amp, was able to take the oncoming Gah Lak Tus swarm and crush them into a ball together. The group starts to move and goes into tunnels under the little island they're on. While they talk a bit about home and about the circumstances, the Gah Lak Tus swarm has been healing and upgrading to protect itself from Mach Two again. They swarm again and attack Jimmy, beginning to turn him while they try to escape. Rogue refuses to let him die and powers herself up to go fight with Jimmy to keep him in control. Pixie comes to help too, teleporting infected cells out of Jimmy's body. He seems saved, though somewhat weakened, and Pixie feels ready to get them home...until she's killed by the swarm, stranding them in this other dimension.
Tensions are ramping up here and it's putting these people, who are pretty much still kids, through more than they've been through in their lives, which is particularly impressive considering how much they've been through in their lives. It's nice to see what's up with the swarm while Galactus gets air time over in the main part of the Ultimate Universe. It's also good to explain where the bulk of the X-Men are while we're primed to see the other X-Men start to make appearances over in the main titles. There is good character stuff in here, which is a bonus because there wasn't a ton the last time out and I was afraid some of these characters would just get washed over with the volume of characters in this mini and the scale of the plot. There is still time for character stuff and Fialkov uses it well. Not a bad entry to CATACLYSM.
Longshot Saves the Marvel Universe 4
Hastings (w) and Camagni, Calderon-Zurita, and Pallot (a) and Milla (c)
Things are getting desperate as the fight to return things to normalcy rages on. Longshot escapes to try to join up with Spider-Man and Dr. Dipson but he's followed by the controlled Deadpool who isn't quipping and who is driven by his one objective: killing Longshot. Just as they get to Dipson's and as things reach their most dire for Longshot, Deadpool is distracted and brought out of his stupor by the taco truck outside of Dipson's. Dipson reveals that the teddy bear he's been tasked with protecting is actually part of the cosmic cube Longshot used to start everything. They rejoin the parts and return the universe to its normal state, which leaves Longshot facing down the In-Betweener, back as one being. Longshot prepares to face his own death, as this is what the In-Betweener was aiming for the whole time, but the In-Betweener decides that it was probably the broken cosmic cube causing the problems he'd assigned to Longshot and spares him.
Not a bad ending for the series which was a pleasant surprise of a series. I had my doubts, as did probably most people, when they announced a Longshot mini-series because, well, Longshot, you know? I was encouraged by the decision to use Christopher Hastings as the writer and it's one that clearly paid off as the fun in this series outweighed any sort of convoluted plots or anything of the like. The writing was solid, the characters were fairly solid, even the ones who appeared here and there like Captain America or Dr. Strange or the Superior Spider-Man (there's a nice scene in this issue where Dipson tells Spider-Man of the time he foiled Doc Ock and made him look stupid that Spider-Man has to grit his teeth at). Nice little series.
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