Nothing Good Comes Out of Ultimates

Wasn’t entirely sure where to stick this, since it’s not entirely a review, but more of a nerd rant… So it sort of got tossed around in various places. Slight Avengers: Age of Ultron spoilers because that’s what sparked this whole discussion in the first place.

When I say, “Ultimates,” I am referring to a line of comics Marvel released that rebooted several of their popular series, all with the preface of “Ultimate” in front of them. I actually read the beginnings of the X-Men one, then lost track of it until I heard that the line basically imploded because of how “WTF?” it was. Now, I’m not big on most comic books (despite loving certain superheroes). Why? Because I can’t keep up with the multiple timelines and verses and the contradictory information… It makes me want to scream. I do better with stand alone graphic novels or short runs. Ultimates should have worked for me, since it was short by necessity and most things comic fans (or at least, the fans I knew at the time, this was back during the hermit days of freshman year) complained about, I liked.

Oh, no. They were right about Ultimates.

So with my crazy way of read comics, rather than being particularly attached to timelines or plots, I pick heroes that I care about. Doesn’t matter what’s going on with the other characters, in fact I will skip whole issues if my characters aren’t in them, and I only try to understand the bigger plots so I know what this personally means for those characters. Their numbers are few…but mighty. And the Marvel ones are, in order of priority:

1. Rogue
2. Remy “Gambit” Lebeau
3. Clint “Hawkeye” Barton
4. Bobbi “Mockingbird” Morse
5. Laura “Talon,” “X-23” Kinney
6. Wanda “Scarlet Witch” Maximoff

Rogue doesn’t have a name on this list because she has different names depending on continuity. 😛 The others are pretty consistent.

But with that list in hand, let’s take a brief walk through what Ultimates does to my poor babies. Bobbi and Laura are spared, they aren’t even in the series. This immediately means my Hawkingbird ship is dead, but you know, as long as it isn’t Clintasha, I can live with this (I love Red, I do, but she and Clint would kill each other). As for Wanda, she gets off light in that she only has an incestuous relationship with Pietro. (Yes, incest is “light” and “only,” does that tell you how bad this is about to get yet?)

Top two’s turn. There’s a brief side story of much sadness with Remy, living as a petty thief on the streets and getting his guilt issues going. Then we get to Rogue, here named Marian Carlyle after “Robin Hood’s gal,” a reference I absolutely love. She does her stint as a villain, as is tradition with her, and then she hops over to the good side. Much like in the movies, she has to get left by Bobby for Kitty (because this is such a good pairing, ya’ll /sarcasm). But she has a madcap adventure with crazy-curly-haired Gambit, and then they go off on thieving adventure together. If they had left it there, life would have been good. But no. You see, Rogue was at one point a partner with Juggernaut during the villain stint, and he wants her back. One big bad fight in Vegas later, Juggernaut is taken care of… And Remy is dying. So what’s the solution? Rogue kisses him until she absorbs him to death.

I threw that volume across the room and refused to read the rest of the series except one later volume I indulged in for the gay!Piotr story.

So there’s most of my list down and dead or not involved. Surely things aren’t so bad with Hawkeye right? Here is where you all who don’t want spoiled for Age of Ultron need to turn away, because this is the version they are working from in the films. So Clint obviously isn’t with Bobbi, instead he secretly dates and marries a girl named Laura, completely off of SHIELD records for her own safety. They have three kids, the youngest still a baby. All is going well. Until there is a traitor among the Avengers-esque Ultimates Team…who proceeds to track down his family, violently murder them all down to the baby, and then leave their bodies for him to find. And it doesn’t end there. Instead Clint finds the traitor and kills them for vengeance for his family. And then, because we haven’t tortured him enough, he becomes a glorified death-seeker. For my fellow Final Fantasy X/X-2 fans, he becomes Nooj. Nooj. They turned Gippal into Nooj!

Yeah, try to wrap your head around that one.

I’m excited about the MCU. I love the movies, and I feel like they are how superhero movies should be done. But man, picking that version of Hawkeye makes me all sorts of sad and dreading the upcoming films. I don’t want to see that ugly fallout in live-action…

End nerd-rant.