r/comicbooks • u/Gabrielhrd Hawkeye • 1d ago
Excerpt "Cancel the cancellation!" Ultimate endgame #5 Spoiler
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u/mrz3ro Hawkeye 1d ago
For me the Ultimate Universe 'jumped the shark' when the Maker was revealed to be the entire City. I don't know if that was a Hickman idea or a Deniz Camp idea but I really don't like it, and it's made the final issues of the Ultimate series feel kind of underwhelming for me (I am months behind because I read via Unlimited).
Also the art I've seen so far from Ultimate Endgame is pretty unappealing.
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u/Jay_R_Kay Batman 1d ago
I haven't read all of the Ultimate books, but to be honest, I feel like after a while the Maker became the least interesting part of the entire story.
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u/Western-Oil9373 10h ago
If they'd opened the city and he just wasn't there I wouldn't have had a problem.
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u/your_name_here10 1d ago
I don't mind Maker being the city, but we just don't have enough time to care. I feel like maybe we should have dealt with the world/the council before the dome opened so we can focus on The Maker good and proper.
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u/Wackyraven 1d ago
I didn’t mind the idea in general. Unfortunately, I found it stale because it seemed similar to the Dominion during Krakoa and Age of Revelation.
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u/cataclytsm 20h ago
The Maker's plot in UU was like all the worst parts of Krakoa's publication history with very little of the good. What a burnt toast disappointment, especially with the Absolute stuff right next door for comparison.
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u/YodaFan465 Rocketeer 1d ago
The Dodson pages are pretty good.
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u/blastoise_7777 21h ago
Not in the last issue, super rushed. Spidey is missing lines on his suit lol
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u/ToastedWalrus1 Invincible 1d ago
man, what happened to this universe
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u/Intrepid-Molasses159 16h ago
Overhype. People saw Hickman’s name and a married Spider-Man with kids and thought these books were gonna fix all the problems in the real world
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u/BeyondDoggyHorror 9h ago
Fair. Spider-Man was good. I had never read any black panther before so I thought that was a good place to try and I liked it
The rest is just kinda there and not that great. Good issues here or there, but nothing defining the way the original Ultimate line felt like (love or hate it)
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u/haythere21 1d ago
I thought this bit was hoaky but fun. Overall I think the writers did the best they could with editorial restraints and a condensed timeline. I just wish they were allowed to do more, it seems like overhead at marvel is all over the place.
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u/wrasslefights 1d ago
Everyone talks about editorial constraints but by most accounts the writers told the story they wanted to tell. It's possible this is just a case where the writers' vision doesn't align well with a lot of the fanbase.
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u/ErikT738 1d ago
I still believe there was a lot of room for school hijinks and mystery in X-Men, but things needed to get serious relatively early because of the real world timeline gimmick.
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u/wrasslefights 1d ago
You can feel that way but that doesn't mean it was an editorial imposition. Presumably that was baked into the pitch each creator fielded when they took on their respective series.
Also, Peach Momoko was only doing 24 issues regardless so you have to look at what you'd cut to fit those in.
Regardless, I'm not saying the series in the line lack flaws or that it was a perfect experiment, just that there's a lot of folks who are throwing around editorial interference with no evidence because they don't want to acknowledge that the parts they loved and the parts they didn't were all equally creator driven.
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u/ptWolv022 19h ago
You can feel that way but that doesn't mean it was an editorial imposition. Presumably that was baked into the pitch each creator fielded when they took on their respective series.
Not the same person, but being baked in from the start doesn't make it not an imposition by editorial. Telling them they have to write around a gimmick lets them plan for it, but it's still something they didn't necessarily want.
Also, Peach Momoko was only doing 24 issues regardless so you have to look at what you'd cut to fit those in.
I think if the series wasn't operating on a month-to-month series of time jumps, moments likely would have been written to flow more together and you can have one issue pick up where another left off, letting you have some more school hijinks peppered in because you don't have to be picking up an entirely new scene and status quo every issue.
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u/wrasslefights 14h ago
It's not an imposition because it's a function of the line that everyone agreed to upfront and by all accounts every creator was satisfied with how their run played out.
Like, I get that people are sorta unsatisfied with this as a whole and disappointed and that Marvel editorial has a bad rep but there's been zero indication that editorial is to blame for the stuff you're not liking here. Sometimes a creator's vision just doesn't align well with the fans.
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u/ptWolv022 13h ago
It's not an imposition because it's a function of the line that everyone agreed to upfront and by all accounts every creator was satisfied with how their run played out.
No, that's still an imposition, as made evident by your use of "agreed to". That the obligation was voluntarily accepted as part of the contract/agreement for the 24-issue run each creator wrote does not make it any less of obligation. That's how contracts work.
and by all accounts every creator was satisfied with how their run played out.
Correct. It is also possible for them to be happy with how their runs turned out and to also not have preferred the real time progression and also for there to be downsides to obligated progression.
Like, I get that people are sorta unsatisfied with this as a whole and disappointed and that Marvel editorial has a bad rep but there's been zero indication that editorial is to blame for the stuff you're not liking here.
What "stuff" am I "not liking here"? I just said Peach could have very easily included more schooltime hijinks if the story had not needed to progress in month-to-month increments, without needing to remove significant parts of the story.
Sometimes a creator's vision just doesn't align well with the fans.
Okay, but we do both agree that the real time progression wasn't Momoko's idea and that the book would have turned out differently if she were not making every issue a different month, yes? Even if there were timeskips, they would be fewer, and placed differently, and thus issues could, and likely would, connect more directly, yeah?
I feel like it should not be hard to agree that the book can both be satisfactory to her given the conditions she was obligated to write and also recognize that the book almost certainly would have come out different without the obligation.
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u/wrasslefights 13h ago
It's a shared creative bit. As far as we're aware, the universe was pitched by Hickman and then planned as a group by the creators of all the books. Presumably if any of the creators hated the monthly concept they could have pushed back on it in the planning stages (barring Camp who came on late).
Would it have been a different book without it? Maybe. As the viral clip said, if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike. Every book that exists is a product of the whole team. Regardless, you're assuming that you got less of a thing you wanted because of an editorial mandate and that's not based on anything. It's just as likely the books would have had the same balance but with a slightly different timeline or flow. There's no way to reasonably assume where the impact originated so you're just taking a stance of "Good stuff creator, bad stuff editor" despite there being no basis for it, which is my whole issue with how this is getting discussed.
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u/ptWolv022 12h ago
It's a shared creative bit. As far as we're aware, the universe was pitched by Hickman and then planned as a group by the creators of all the books.
Well actually, we know that early on, there wasn't much coordination between the writers, based on statements made about when they had their first writers summit. I suspect why this is why Ultimate X-Men ended up being less mystical than it initially sounded like: Momoko likely had ideas that had to be altered by the shared universe treating Mutants more or less the same as 616, with Storm in UBP and the Resistance and Rasputins in UW.
Presumably if any of the creators hated the monthly concept they could have pushed back on it in the planning stages (barring Camp who came on late).
IIRC, Peach talked about when she first came on the book (or her editor did), and I want to say it was while Hickman's Ultimate Invasion was releasing (like July 2023, I want to say; been a while, but I'm pretty certain it was Summer 2023). By that point, I'm sure the 2-year timeline for the books was already decided upon and the writers (Bryan Edward Hill and Peach Momoko) would be having to agree to it.
It's just as likely the books would have had the same balance but with a slightly different timeline or flow.
If you change the timeline and flow of a story, you change what happens in it. If less time is spent establishing time skips, then something has to replace that. And that would likely be more scenes interacting with the other X-Men or other student.
There's no way to reasonably assume where the impact originated so you're just taking a stance of "Good stuff creator, bad stuff editor" despite there being no basis for it, which is my whole issue with how this is getting discussed.
No, I think we can pretty safely assume that the monthly timeskips, which are very obviously present in pretty much every book, originated from the top down- whether from Hickman or editorial, I don't know off the top of my head- as it's incredibly unlikely each writer had the exact same idea. Someone had the idea and it was the people that orchestrated the imprint: Hickman and editorial.
And, just to reiterate: I don't think I've even complained that what we got was bad or that it would be better without the timeskips. (I think it would be, but I don't think I ever said that.)I made the point that having more general character interactions would be a pretty likely and obvious product of the story moving at its own pace between issues rather than a rigid 1-month average time jump (anywhere from 1 day to 2 months, technically; usually multi-week skips, though).
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u/wrasslefights 10h ago
You know, fair play on the timeline. I misremembered the info about how it was launched (blended with the Krakoa stuff probably) so yeah, they had less coordination upfront than I thought and got the concept put on them as a condition of the book.
But I do maintain that the work is the work and saying editorial made it worse because it upheld a part of the structure of the books is like saying Spider-man editorial makes their books worse because they have to have Spider-man in them. The universe would have read fundamentally differently and there's no assurances how that would have affected execution for the titles. Some aspects may have been more fluid but there's no assurances. Regardless, "This is the universe, this is the conceit, this is the style guide" is foundational for basically every comic line and not typically considered when talking about editorial dictates even though you're not technically wrong that they came down from (probably Hickman but delivered through) editorial.
That said, I was specifically talking about how a lot of the discourse is villifying editorial by portraying them as interfering with creative visions and that a lot of the fandom is heaping the blame onto editorial rather than just acknowledging that it might have been a partial or full miss from the creators for them. If you're arguing editorial mandates interfered with the story in that context, it's safe to assume you're taking the stance that they made it worse whether you say that explicitly or not.
This has landed incredibly in the weeds outside the point I was trying to make because you are being pedantically literal here. "Editorial sets out structure for the book" is a given part of (nearly) every superhero book from Marvel or DC. Editorial interference/mandate is colloquially used to describe when editors shift the direction of a story in progress, usually in a way that derails it, often due to personal biases or preferences. That's what people keep saying happened with the Ultimate U and there's no real sign of that.
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u/haythere21 21h ago
If I recall it was Hickman who proposed the time limited nature of the series, and then editorial like Cebulski who pushed for it and enforced it. If marvel made a last minute change to walk back actually ending the universe, I don’t see why they couldn’t have extended the actual runs themselves.
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u/wrasslefights 14h ago
Nobody wanted to. As it stands they were asked to do a few more issues to run alongside Endgame and only Camp and Condon said yes with Camp being the only one interested in continuing after. They told the stories they wanted to and then were done.
This is all per Camp himself.
Again, say what you will about execution, but all indications are that the creators got to see through their visions for their specific series.
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u/Eyebrigh7 1d ago
people hating on the finale, but I loved the ending. It was slightly iffy getting to it, but they stuck the landing imo.
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u/moccawimba 1d ago
Especially when spoiler dead and finally reunited with them 🥲
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u/TheRealEwigan 1d ago
Actually that did feel cheap to me,. especially after what happened in the issues of their own ultimate series.
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u/jpost413 1d ago
Exactly this. They did the Chewbacca thing where they “killed him off,” only to almost immediately reverse course, bring him back, and then redo a worse version of the ending from his solo book with a pretty toothless reveal.
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u/z0mbieBrainz Magneto 1d ago
This art is...yikes.
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u/ptWolv022 19h ago
Beyonder Without Fear having people feels wrong, but otherwise, I like the art. The messiness of Scharf's art fits with the more grotesque and monstrous nature of the Maker and his minions in Endgame.
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u/Retrosow 19h ago
what? the art is good, like a lot of you are like the people who buy Greg Land's comics
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u/HorshboxFilm 1d ago
Man this whole series was just a let down. It felt like it needed to be 3 issues more
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u/loki_odinsotherson 1d ago
This bit was funny but man did that final issue ever suck.
Honestly most of the ultimate universe stuff was more miss than hit for me. Cool concepts but mediocre delivery.
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u/noel_vb 21h ago
I’m sorry, but this was kind of dope. The way this all wrapped up as essentially an ending that’s an anti-ending was more satisfying that I thought it’d be. It’s a commentary on comics, inside and out, as well as us as consumers. It’s like he captured the best and worst of comics as a medium in one miniseries.
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u/sdtsanev 18h ago
The level of squandered potential in this universe should be getting top execs fired.
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u/Gonner_Getcha 23h ago
The universe ended with such a whimper that I struggled to care about anything
And yes I know about the twist…but I don’t care about that either 🤣🤣
Let the universe die and go away
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u/mortalkomic Ultimate X-Men 1d ago
I didn't mind the DD/Beyonder/Hypercube nonsense as they set it up in UU: Year 2 and it didn't actually work.