Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 5, Guardians of the Galaxy 12

Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 5
Bendis (w) and Bagley and Hennessy (a) and Keith (c)

Kitty Pryde is prepped and ready to go in the fight against Galactus. She grows to giant size and goes after Galactus, providing the rest of the Ultimates with the distraction they need. Reed Richards launches a little ship towards Galactus and, as the world-eater begins to retaliate against Kitty, it flies behind him and opens a portal to the Negative Zone. Galactus begins to be pulled in, along with Kitty, as Reed preps to shut the portal. Spider-Man and Sue Storm race to catch up to and save Kitty despite the fact that, as Reed puts it, she knew her chances of survival. The pair of them catch up to Kitty and start trying to pull her back but the pull of the Negative Zone is strong. Galactus is going in first but it won't be long before it pulls the whole city in piece by piece as Galactus struggles against it. Fortunately, the deus ex machina comes in the form of actual deus Thor, who flies straight at Galactus with enough power to push him into the portal. With Spider-Man, Sue, and Kitty still fighting the pull, Reed goes to shut the portal down. Tony stops him for a moment, begging him to give Thor a chance to come out of it, but ultimately relents and Reed closes it down. With the threat gone and the city left to rebuild, Storm finds Captain America's shield in the wreckage, but with no sign of a body.

So this is it for Cataclysm after what feels like a really long time. It's a solid issue and the end of a pretty good event as a whole (though, and this isn't anybody's fault, it seems as if this solution is exactly the same as the solution at the end of the video game Lego: Marvel Superheroes, an immensely frustrating game only because of how broken it is but ultimately fun - this is my review of it, tucked away inside of a review of a comic. Maybe I'll really review it at some point. LOOK, whatever). Given that this is the Ultimate Universe, it's very surprising how few casualties there were in Galactus' would-be world-ending attack. Granted, Galactus is very much, more than anyone else in probably any universe, an all-or-nothing sort of villain, but I think we only really saw the death of Vision and maybe Punisher? Everyone else survived, after a manner of speaking, though the fate of Captain America is still up in the air (I'm going to go ahead and guess that if they didn't show a body this issue they're never going to, not until he's shown to still be alive) and Thor is trapped in the Negative Zone. Neat stuff with a good amount of potential as the Ultimate Universe does indeed survive and continue.

Guardians of the Galaxy 12
Bendis (w) and Pichelli, S. Immonen, and von Grawbadger (a) and Ponsor (c)

The Guardians and all-new X-Men have met up with the Starjammers, shocking a young Cyclops to his core as he comes across his father for the first time since he saw their plane blown up. Of course, for Corsair this isn't the first time he's seen one of his sons since but it's the first time he's seen him so young. All of this is covered and Scott has a lot to deal with as he runs into some new emotional ground and has to work his way through it with X-23, who comes to give him a hug. They've reached the Shi'ar throne world and found their defenses high as a whole ton of Shi'ar have gathered at the planet. Coming soon, too, will be J-Son, head of the Spartax empire and father of Peter Quill as he's received word that, despite his previous announcement to all the planets and races out there, the Shi'ar have meddled with Earth and the Guardians are heading for them. Meanwhile, Gladiator believes that the X-Men, though they may even be aware of Jean Grey's disappearance, won't get there before a decision is reached about Jean's fate. She's not helping her case as she continues to lash out and yell about her innocence as the trial commences.

There are...interesting parts to this storyline. On the one hand, it feels like trying to do too much, throwing the Starjammers into this story after years on the outskirts of the Marvel Universe and really only to show young Scott his father again. Sure they may play a bigger role but it feels like such a weird time to throw them in except as a plot device. By the same token, sending the Spartax there to further J-Son's demands that Earth be left alone makes sense to the story at large but it may also be one too many moving parts. Finally, I still don't particularly care for the driving plot behind this story. Putting aside my many complaints about the O5 X-Men being in the present, I just can't bring myself to care about another story right now where someone is charged with possible crimes from their future. It's been done a lot and it can be done really, really well and it's been done a lot recently and sometimes pretty well. Here, though, it's not as compelling and it's weirdly timed, coming right off of BATTLE OF THE ATOM, which dealt very much with the same sort of ideas, AGE OF ULTRON, which dealt very much with the same sort of ideas, and INFINITY, which dealt with Gladiator and the Shi'ar finding immense respect for Earth and its people. Makes me not love this event as a whole, though there are parts that may work in the end. Hopefully the parts are enough to justify the sum.

Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 4, Revolutionary War - Knights of Pendragon 1, Night of the Living Deadpool 2

Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 4
Bendis (w) and Bagley and Hennessy (a) and Keith (c)

The Ultimates have recruited the X-Men in the fight against Galactus and their newest, perhaps most desperate, plan revolves around Kitty Pryde. Their hope is to use Pym Particles to allow her to grow to near-Galactus size (or at least nearer-Galactus size) and get her close to the cosmic entity before she phases through him and, if all goes well, disrupts all of his technology inside. It's a gambit but it's the best they can do on such a short schedule. They inject Kitty with the particles but can't actually get her moving just yet as Jean Grey, who Stark had trying to probe Galactus' mind for any useful information, is noticed by Galactus and he turns his attentions towards the helicarrier. While they start to abandon ship, Captain America jumps into a jet and flies straight at Galactus, ramming the jet into Galactus' mouth as Cap attempts to bail. The helicarrier goes down, hopefully after a number of people were able to escape with the distraction Cap provided, and Galactus remains.

The cover would have you believe that Cap doesn't make it from his jump out of the jet but the pages inside don't indicate anything specific and, with comics, specifics are everything. Without a body, you can almost guarantee an alive body will turn up sometime soon. This event is still interesting and still worthy of, it would appear, the possible conclusion of the ULTIMATE line (by the way, I think we've covered but it's not the conclusion as they've already solicited and talked about new parts of the all-new Ultimate line or whatever they're calling it) but I think, for how small and contained the Ultimate Universe feels compared to the main universe, the sheer volume of books about this event has hurt the tension of it. With so many books and an entire universe tied to its outcome, it's starting to feel, even amidst all the action and all of the big set pieces, that the event is dragging. Almost every event at this point seems to reach that threshold, an invisible line where the reader's interest inevitably begins to wane. I do wonder if there are readers out there who are just reading the Ultimate Universe stuff and have been following this event with bated breath. Do you, mysterious reader, feel like it's still moving really well? Am I tainted because I've read every major Marvel book in between all of these CATACLYSM books? I don't know but it's the inherent problem (or one of the inherent problems) with these events and I think this whole event would be wise to start reaching its conclusion.

Revolutionary War - Knights of Pendragon 1
R. Williams (w) and Sliney (a) and Gandini (c)

Dai Thomas and Kate McLellan go to investigate an old underground Mys-Tech base while Pete Wisdom and Union Jack go to Avalon to warn Albion about Mys-Tech's re-emergence. Both pairs run into problems as Dai and Kate run afoul of the zombies of King Arthur's court, intent on returning to run Britain. Wisdom and Jack find that Mys-Tech beat them to Avalon and overran the Green Knight and possibly Albion. The stories converge as Albion falls out of Avalon and into the underground base (they were together the whole time, practically!) and manages to lead the Knights of Pendragon again. However, it's short lived as their overrun again fairly quickly. Fortunately, Wisdom snags zombie Excalibur and uses it to awaken the Green Knight, turning him into a knight for today (something like a marathon runner that's PROBABLY a British reference but I'm not about to understand it) and saving everyone, even resurrecting Dai, who had kind of died during the battle.

I was rather looking forward to this part of REVOLUTIONARY WAR because, on top of continuing the plot that I'm having a bit of trouble really getting into, it was bringing in characters I like and know a bit better in Pete Wisdom and Union Jack. It, instead, didn't really end up working for me and I found the whole thing something of a headache and often more grating than entertaining. It does a lot of the "clever, too-cool-for-this" captions thing I've taken such issue with over the last year or so and goes SO FAR out of its way to make sure we know the key points of these characters. Pete Wisdom calls himself a cynical guy, like, a hundred times in this issue (I didn't actually count but it FEELS like a hundred) and there's nothing I like LESS than a sarcastic or cynical person constantly asserting how cynical or sarcastic they are. UGH. Anyway, the plot doesn't clear up at all here as we only tangentially see what Mys-Tech is up to and the issue serves as just a way to show off a couple more characters and to point out who's Welsh and who isn't (?).

Night of the Living Deadpool 2
Bunn (w) and Rosanas (a and c)

Check it everyone, I can write this review SO FAST and you'll still get a PERFECT sense of this book. Deadpool and his team of humans travel through the zombies and typical zombie stuff happens, with the one person in their group who was already bitten turning and going on to turn someone else before Deadpool kills them both, then the other three people with him get bitten one after the other after Deadpool and company visit a slew of classic zombie-media locales (ie Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, oodles of Walking Dead, others I'm less familiar with, etc). Deadpool, now alone, finds himself near a human commune ready to be invaded by a group of other humans.

This series is a loving homage to zombies and everything zombie in media and, as such, straddles a fine line between nostalgia, hamfisted reference, and Deadpool. The art is really the standout of the book, particularly as we already have something sort of this nature with Headpool from MARVEL ZOMBIES, but it still can't really cover the fact that this book is only going to be for the true Deadpool fans out there and MAYBE for the true zombie fans out there. The problem is that zombie Marvel was already done better in the aforementioned MARVEL ZOMBIES and zombies in general have already been done better in...well, everything they mention from Night of the Living Dead to the amazing Shaun of the Dead to The Walking Dead. So every beat is predictable in some fashion, meaning that the allure of these Deadpool-centric series, the draw of seeing some new idea, is kind of gone. I liked DEADPOOL KILLUSTRATED best of all of these little series and that one introduced the most original ideas. After a turn through Deadpool fighting Deadpools (and at least the neat idea of a Deadpool alternate-costume for every hero they could fit on the page), we get to this. I don't know. I think the most I can say is that you'll probably know if you'll like it right from the get-go and if it's not for you in its design than it's not going to ever be for you.

Revolutionary War - Alpha 1, Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 3, Cataclysm - Ultimate Spider-Man 3

Revolutionary War - Alpha 1
Lanning and Cowsill (w) and Elson (a) and Fabela (c)

Geez that's a long post title with just a whole bunch of hyphens. Anyway, Marvel UK is back on the map with REVOLUTIONARY WAR and this is our opening shot to the series. Of course, plenty of these characters haven't been seen for a while so we're due for a bit of recap and character summarization which the writers provide in excruciating detail. On top of that, we learn a bit about our plot; there had been an organization of techno-wizards (it's always wizards in Britain) from around 1000 AD who had made a deal with Mephisto to grant them immortality. Somewhat recently, though, they had established a corporation called Mys-Tech and fed Mephisto more and more souls in exchange for keeping their own alive. Of course, they got to a point where they wanted to stay immortal but break from their contract. To do so, they found a great deal of artifacts and alien tech to help them and realized that they could get out of their contract if they sacrificed Great Britain's entire population to Mephisto. They tried and everyone fought at the Battle of London Bridge (covered up, of course, by MI-13). Plenty of heroes died in the battle but Mys-Tech was stopped. OR SO IT SEEMED. Colonel Tigon Liger (yes, that's a real Marvel UK hero's name. I know, I rolled my eyes too) has been a drunk since the battle, where he was forced to make the decision to close Mys-Tech's portal to hell before they could bring hell to Earth even though several of their fighters were on the other side. Now they're all coming back to make the world burn.

There's an interesting story in here but I'm a little nervous about the writing of this first issue alone. There is a lot of ground to cover to establish our characters and our history here, which is undoubtedly why the first heroes we see and the ones who we spend the most time with in this issue are our biggest current UK characters in Captain Britain and Pete Wisdom. Conveniently, Wisdom wasn't around for the Battle of London Bridge so he needs as much catching up as we do. I watched the first 15 minutes or so of the pilot for CBS' new drama Intelligence the other day and had to shut it off because it was very clear that the series wasn't really aiming for subtext anywhere (I have plenty of problems with CBS and this is definitely a recurring one). Characters were constantly fully defining other characters so we didn't actually have to learn about a character, we could just be told ("you DO need a handler even though you're a great asset! I know you need a handler because your last mission was to find the location of the nukes in Mongolia, and you went off mission looking for her. I know you don't want to hear this again but your wife, Amelia, is dead. She was captured long ago and we lost contact with her and she's definitely dead" is pretty much the gist of it). That's a little how this issue feels and it's not how you want to dive into a book, with all of this unnatural exposition and dialogue. I'm hoping that now the first issue is out of the way things start to feel a little more natural but we'll see. The story seems good enough to hold up the series, let's just hope it has the chance to.

Cataclysm - Ultimates' Last Stand 3
Bendis (w) and Bagley and Hennessy (a) and Keith (c)

Under Tony Stark's instruction (and armed with one of his repulsors), Spider-Man is going into the 616 with Reed Richards to ensure that he stays on mission and comes home with the right answer to stop Galactus. Despite protests from Sue and others, Reed and Miles set off and quickly make it to the 616's Baxter Building. They break in with relative ease (you'd think Reed would program in security to stop alternate dimension F4s from getting in, considering how frequently it comes up, but apparently not) and download the data on Galactus without being spotted. However, Valeria shows up as they're about to leave and recognizes that Reed isn't her Reed and the security turns on them. Reed, who had copied two different flash drives with Galactus info and given one to Miles and kept one in case they got separated, tells Miles to go and to get back and deliver the information. He does, ditching the security robots on the other Spider-Man who happens to be swinging by (don't TOTALLY understand how that works, their costumes aren't that similar and there are pretty obvious size differences), and he makes it back to the Ultimate Universe to deliver the info. Before they can question him too long about Reed, Reed makes his way back through the portal. He apologizes to Sue for ruining their life, now that he's seen what they could have had and how beautiful the world really is.

Really cheesy ending and I guess I don't totally buy it? I don't know. This Reed is very strange and it's hard to pin down his personality, exactly. Sometimes he's an aloof psychotic genius and sometimes he's just a psychotic 616 Reed. Look, either way he's pretty psychotic. I get that seeing the way things turned out for an alternate dimension you would change things, potentially, and even meeting your potential daughter could change things but this seems like an abrupt turnaround. Of course, it could all be a lie and he could be playing them but who knows. Anyway, this is a super weird event for me. It's interesting enough and all the books are focusing on interesting parts of the event but I've never had an event that is so hard to distinguish book from book. Characters appear in several books at once, plot seems to move in every book but it's hard to tell which plot is the main plot, etc. I know some of those issues may seem petty, but it's been a little weird to read an issue then see it advertise the next issue of CATACLYSM (the main series) and be surprised that that wasn't what I was reading. It's melding together, which is kind of a good thing but also kind of weird to actually see happen. I guess we'll just have to wait for this one to end before I can tell if the layout worked for me.

Cataclysm - Ultimate Spider-Man 3
Bendis (w) and Marquez (a) and Ponsor (c)

A plane from Great Britain didn't understand in time not to go to Newark because there is no more Newark (I get that no one is anticipating anything like Galactus but I imagine pilots are pretty well-trained to go to a different airport if the tower is telling them to go to a different airport) and, as a result, flies directly at Galactus. It comes crashing down in pieces including right at the foot of the Morales' apartment while Jefferson yells at Miles for being Spider-Man, who Jefferson decides is responsible for the deaths of both his brother and his wife. He says a lot of horrible things and is generally horrible until Miles has to leave him to go help with the plane wreckage, asking him to wait until he can come back and save him. With the help of Spider-Woman, Cloak and Dagger, and Bombshell, they manage to save the survivors (including a very strange J. Jonah Jameson) and teleport them to a Pittsburgh hospital. Miles returns home to find that Jefferson has left as Cap calls him in to help with the Galactus business (as seen in CATACLYSM - ULTIMATES' LAST STAND).

That Jefferson guy is a real jerk. There's a sense, as there has been throughout Miles' story, that we're supposed to find Jefferson as aggressive and quick-to-anger and particularly against Spider-Man, obviously unjustly but with limited information that we can all supposedly understand. It doesn't always read that way, though, and this is no exception. Not to say that he wouldn't act this way in this moment but I can never get a real feel for the character. Sometimes he seems tolerant and like love of his family conquers all (particularly love and pride in his son) and sometimes it seems like he's just gone crazy. I had problems with him earlier in this series too, as he suddenly became a freedom fighter or something. That was pretty weird. Anyway, nice little team-up for the five teenage superheroes we've seen dominating this book recently and presumably a turnaround on this Spider-Man from J. Jonah Jameson (all it takes is for every Ultimate Spider-Man to save his life individually, it seems). More good Marquez art and solid Ponsor colors help the story along.