Comic: "The Ultimates 3, #2"
Published by: Marvel Comics
Written by: Jeff Loeb
Artist: Joe Madureira

Reviewer: Max Burbank
Posted: 1/28/2008

Plot: Hawkeye goes after Spidey for no reason. Quicksilver brings his sister/lover Wanda’s assassinated corpse back to the mansion. The Brotherhood of Mutants attacks and a slugfest ensues. Magneto convinces Quicksilver that the Brotherhood stands a better chance of catching his sister's killer than the Ultimates do, and with a super speed assist, the Brotherhood, Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch’s body escape.

Review: Ugh. What was merely mediocre gets really bad real fast. Here’s the breakdown. Hawkeye went to central park looking for the Black Panther who got punched there last issue, but ends up shooting a passing Spider-Man with a tranquilizer dart instead. Why? Venom’s a Spider-Man villain, so what could be more natural than capturing Spider-Man for information instead of, you know, asking him? I guess we’re reinforcing what passes for character development here, i.e. since Hawkeye’s gone mental over the massacre of his family and now he’s this loose cannon with a death wish, a really fresh idea totally worth doing. Quicksilver tells us that Wanda was killed by a bullet that was specifically seeking her DNA. How does he know this? Well, he wasn’t able to stop the bullet with his super speed, so what other explanation could there possibly be?

To me it looked in the last issue like the bullet pierced Quickies’ hand so silly me, I guessed it was some sort of armor piercing bullet, or that maybe his hand wasn’t bullet proof. I feel pretty stupid I missed the whole ‘locked onto her DNA’ angle. Meanwhile Thor’s in bed with his hot teenage super squeeze, Valkyrie, and just in case you missed it being mentioned twice last issue, she asks if Thor isn’t curious how she used to have no powers and now she’s got powers. Turns out he isn’t, so I guess the writer had her bring it up because he might have otherwise wasted valuable word bubble space MOVING THE PLOT FORWARD.

Additionally, Ultimate Thor has now started speaking bad improv troupe Shakespeare just like classic Thor. Now, the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ were cute back in the 1960’s when I was in grammar school, but one of the things I liked most about Ultimate Thor was he spared us all that crap. Because, work with me here, why exactly would an ancient Norse God ever have talked like an Elizabethan Englishman in the first place? And then, after the Brotherhood and Quickie escape? I’d call this a spoiler alert but it’s more of a foregone conclusion gets confirmed alert. Guess who shows up in the Ultimates broken down doorway? I’ll give you three guesses, and if you say anything but ‘Wolverine’ it doesn’t count. It was actually a relief, ‘cause I’d been seriously worried that the ol’ Canuckle head wasn’t getting enough exposure appearing in every other marvel book. This entire issue gave us one, count it, one new plot point in that the Ultimates are now minus Quicksilver. The saving grace of the first issue, the social commentary of the Ultimates having typical celebrity PR problems, was entirely absent. All we got was super folks hitting each other, which I’m usually okay with in a super hero book, but I think if an Ultimates story is no different stylistically than an Avengers story there’s no damn point.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)