Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?

Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?

Avoid.

OK, that’s my review, in a one-word extremely summed up and condensed sentiment. If you want an explanation as to why you should avoid it… well here comes the rant….

I imagine a meeting with the publisher where They have a critical look at Jeph Loeb, look over his resume, and it looks fantastic. Batman: The Long Halloween! A masterpiece! Nearly as great was the follow up, Dark Victory. Superman for All Seasons was a fresh and bold, yet poetic take on the Man of Steel, yet it still stayed true to the gestalt of the character. So he certainly has it in him to be a great storyteller.

I can only guess at what happened.

I think it must have gone something like Jeph going over to Joe Madureira’s house to meet for a cup of coffee to talk about their upcoming collaboration, at which time Madureira slipped a carefully crafted mixture of Ritalin and peyote buttons into his drink, and then hit him in the head with a brick six or seven times.

The work that was produced in this collaboration was, to put it mildly, a spastic frenzy of an attempt to shoehorn every caricature and cliche possible in comics heroes and science fiction into five issues, and actually take great pains to remove any connection that it may have had with previous continuity, heretofore established character development, and indeed logical reasons for anything at all that happens in the book.

I figure after Joe Madureira had drugged/beaten Jeph Loeb, he held up a bunch of flash cards featuring robots, dinosaurs, soft-core porn, unrelated superheroes that are used only to sell books (Venom! Wolverine! Spider-man!) and bits of cheesy dialogue transcribed from very bad straight-to-video action movies.  He then duct-taped a Dictaphone to Loeb’s head and clamped electrodes hooked up to a car battery to his nether regions and told him to start dictating the story, but he gave him a big shock every time Jeph mentioned anything that had to do with the previously mentioned continuity, character development or logic.

What was produced at the end of that insane weekend was the script to Ultimates 3. After that, I’d like to think that Joe Mad decided to take the same mix of Ritalin and peyote, hook HIMSELF up to the car battery, and occasionally bash his head into a cinder block as he illustrated this work.

It’s hard to really give this book a coherent review as it seems like it is related to a completely different set of, well, EVERYTHING than The Ultimtates Volumes 1 and 2, which are considered to many, myself included, to be one of the most well done and important volumes in superhero comics history. This volume is inversely as bad as Ultimates 1 and 2 were sublime.

I think it may be of certain academic value to have this in your collection, just to prove that sometimes great things can go horribly wrong. I consider this The Ultimates in name only, and I do believe I will regard this as Mark Millar, the original creator of The Ultimates, has… I will pretend it never happened.

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