I feel compelled to buy these big event books with the understanding that they will affect the status quo for years to come. They never do much more than disappoint, even if they start off strong. Ultimatum #1 is a set-up issue, pure and simple. Remember how Ultimates 3 #1 showed us the cast of characters and had a battle leaving the questions: Who? and Why? Ditto. Oh, look, Jeph Loeb wrote that too.

I was surprised to see fewer splash pages than Loeb’s last two efforts, Hulk and Ultimates 3. My guess is that he was told “You may have made McGuiness and Joe Mad your bitches, but I’m the goddam Finchman, and I’m not filling this book with splash pages.” That said, David Finch’s art is awesome, of course. He can’t draw a teenager for shit (Kitty & Peter), but the rest is just breathtaking.

We get a lot of action here, just like in Ultimates 3, but the problem is the same. There are too many characters, so many in fact that we barely get to see any of them or have them interact with each other in any way. The Avengers (Ultimates) are a team that deals with threats too large for any one hero, which is why they are all in the same book. A story with all the Ultimate Universe’s heroes has so many threads to connect that it all feels like a mash-up. The solution? We get a Deux Ex Machina in the form of Professor X contacting all the still-alive heroes to point them in the right direction. Check please!