Did you ever have a favorite pair of shoes….maybe your only pair of shoes…that you wore too often?  After a while they started to slip off your feet when you walked, and the smell was pretty goddamned terrible.  But you just couldn’t bring yourself to throw them away, so you poured eight cans of Febreeze on them, and put them in the back of your closet for a while.  Maybe you bought a new pair of shoes, declared a new pair your favorite, or maybe you just walked around barefoot.  And then, one day, you decide you’re going to take a walk around your old neighborhood, or go to the movies by yourself, and you decide to fish those old shoes out of your pocket.  And damn if they aren’t real comfortable.  And the smell is totally gone now.  They’re not even in that rough of shape.

Bendis’s Ultimate Enemy #1 brings back a whole bunch of Ultimate characters that we haven’t seen since The Ultimatum wave.  And it just feels really good to see them again.  You can barely smell Loeb on them at all.Sandovel and Bonet’s art is crisp, but the highlight of the issue for me are Matthew Wilson’s colors.  Is that weird?  There’s this bright, bubble-gum vibe with these colors that I haven’t seen outside of Invincible.

Those who don’t like Bendis’s long conversations or internal monologues may tune out for a bit, but they weren’t going to like this comic anyway.  Yes, there’s action here, and the impending new enemy seems pretty cool, but this issue is about reconnecting with the characters of the Ultimate Marvel Universe.  Making you care about people you may have left on bad terms with. And in that respect, Bendis has written a brilliant issue.