An Ultimate Falling Out



Should Ultimate Fallout have been titled as Ultimate Comics #0 (1 thru 6).



By Mark Frankland

Be warned this is going to be somewhat on the shorter and much angrier side compared to my other articles. I am annoyed.

Actually no—much more that annoyed. I am downright angry at what is happening at what I declared, not two weeks ago, to be one of the best damn things I have ever read in comics.

Ultimate Fallout sucks. Or at least the last two have and I have the feeling the rest of them will too.  Do you want to know why? There isn’t any Spiderman in my FREAKING SPIDERMAN MEMORIAL SERIES!

I know why Marvel is doing this. And it’s that very crystal clear reason which makes me even angrier. Spiderman’s death attracted a lot of new readers to the last arc of the book and the Fallout issues are doing the same. And do you know what that means for this book? It isn’t about dealing with the death of Ultimate Spidey, it’s about setting up the new Ultimate Universe. Which at this point, I feel I should point out, would be fine with if it was its own series. But that wouldn’t be as big of a draw and that would mean the Ultimate Universe might not start out as strong as it otherwise might. So instead of getting more issues like issue one, we get the Hulk in therapy and Tony Stark joining some frat for pretentious billionaires.  And now I might not pick up the next issues because I feel like I am buying a full price book for ten pages of content I am interested in (who am I kidding? I am a USM zombie! I will buy ANYTHING with its name--God I hate how Marvel knows how to market directly to people like me).

The thing is what makes it somehow even worse is the fact that the bits with the USM extended cast are awesome! And they make every other page that they aren’t in suffer. Actually forget what I said at the beginning. I am not annoyed, I am not angry, I’m disappointed. Disappointed because I have seen what this series could be and how this series could actually pull off a “Death of” story well without it being a massive disaster (I AM LOOKING AT YOU “BATMAN R.I.P.”). Most of all I am disappointed because my favourite character in comics isn’t getting the treatment he deserves and is instead being used as a marketing tool.

Rant over.

At this rate I think I will go back to reviewing obscure books no one had heard of. It saves on heartbreak.

Review: 'Ultimate Fallout' #1

By Mark Frankland

Do you want to know something that I just don’t do? Cry. Seriously, name a sad movie that you cried at in the last ten years that made you cry. I have probably watched it and it may have made me sad but I damn sure didn’t cry. Seriously I have watched Up, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Requiem for a Dream, Stand by Me, Rent and Grave of the Fireflies and not one of them left me reaching for the Kleenex—I can’t say that anymore and it’s because of comics.

And I bet we can all guess which comic I am talking about. Yes, this is a review of the first issue of Ultimate Fallout.

All I am going to say is that this book is the single most emotionally affecting comic book I HAVE EVER READ! Easily beating most of the stuff that I have read and just edging ahead of Magneto Testament as the most likely to reduce someone to tears (seriously a friend of mine who didn’t even like comic books read it and spent an hour crying into a tub of Ben and Jerry’s).