And so, what exactly does one do with the full knowledge of their enemies and the unlimited capacity to engage them before they even have the faintest idea that you exist?

It’s simple really. Whatever one wants.

This is a prelude for the second Ultimate Marvel Universe. And it was a very average comic. And it is the same situation as with DC’s Absolute Universe.

But the world this book introduced looks promising

And i hadn’t mentioned Absolute for no reason, the main concept of both of this lines is quite similar. Ultimate started a year before though, and how exactly this funny coincidence happened is a very good question i have no interest in answering

So what’s going on in here? The Maker(evil Reed Richards from previous Ultimate Verse) had escaped his imprisonment on Earth 616 and wanted to play God on a biggest scale he had done it yet. He got Earth 6160 and modified it in his own image. Specifically he removed all the heroes and villains from the picture(some got killed some were removed in more peaceful way), divided the planet to 7 territories and given control of them to the most malleable of leftover supes, and for shits and giggles tortured Reed Richards of this world into becoming Dr. Doom using a time bubble

And from other things worthy of my attention:

• Tony Stark now has an alive dad who is the Iron Man of this world or at least Schrödinger’s dad :) Tony meanwhile is only an Iron Lad

• Only non-evil Russians of Marvel Universe(Colossus and Magik) are now part of Maker’s cabal

• Peter Parker was saved from becoming Spider-Man Of course he’ll be given a choice to become one, then he will have wife, kids, student debt and alive Uncle Ben :|

• On the world map, that contained the borders of the 7 countries, Vakanda was just standing as a big black dot in a middle of Africa marked as “Undiscovered Territory”

Should you read this book? Honestly, this is a bit more complex prelude than with Absolute. DC did the right thing and you can start at any series without much issue. But Ultimate’s main guy is Jonathan Hickman, a guy known for his very lore heavy run on X-Men, in which you needed to read two series at the same time to get what’s going on in other X-Men adjacent books. He made X-Men into a fucking Game of Thrones with bureaucratic procedures for mutant rebirth

And according to Reddit, this same format is working in here too. It is not a bunch of self contained books that you can just pick up from no.1. It is an anthology series with episodes going simultaneously in different parts of the world. And you’ll need to at least read this book and another oneshot after it to get what is going on in other books.

Simply put: it is kinda like the stucture of MCU, but with comics. And no MCU doesn’t have the comic structure for it’s storytelling, it is too serialized

I currently plan to read Ultimates, Spider-Man and X-Men. And thank god most of this runs are already over and i can just binge them arc by arc