Battleworld: Ultimate End

Comic Info

Ultimate End #1 Variant

Reprints Ultimate End #1-5 (July 2015-February 2016).  Something is wrong in the world…two worlds have collided under Doom and the heroes of both worlds want the worlds restored.  As Fury tries to navigate the situation, Tony Stark and the Tony Stark of the other world are working on a plan with Bruce Banner…but keeping out of sight of Lord Doom and his Thors could be impossible.  The world is headed for collapse and only one world may survive.

Written by Brian Michael Bendis, Battleworld:  Ultimate End is a Marvel Comics Secret Wars event series spin-off title.  The collection features art by Mark Bagley.

The Ultimate Universe started out with a bang.  Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man breathed new life into Spider-Man and created a new world for him to explore that was concise and tied together much like the early years of Marvel’s Earth-616.  As more and more titles were added to the Ultimate line, the Ultimate series became rather unnecessary.  Characters fell out of synch with characters in other books and it essentially was two of the same world competing with each other.  Ultimate End provides an end to the competition, but instead of being a grand sendoff, it feels like a ghostly whimper of what the Ultimate Universe once was.

Ultimate End #5

First and foremost the book is rather confusing.  Heavily tied to the Secret Wars series, the book starts out with little explanation and with duplicate characters inhabiting the same space, infrequent readers of the Ultimate Comics (or readers like myself who fell off around Ultimate Spider-Man #100) will struggle to have any idea of what is going on.  This is merged with the Secret Wars series which in itself was rather difficult to follow…and in classic Bendis form since he started doing event series, neither title really stands on its own nor does this title really do enough to enhance the other title.

For a finally, the finally is anticlimactic.  The series has Hulk fighting Hulk for a bit, the Punisher acting crazy, a fight-non-fight with the Thors, and then a reset which just involves a bunch of talking heads and no explanation of what really occurred.  It is kind of what has come to be expected from these big event series and to collapse a whole world that people invested a lot of time and money in such a lackluster way isn’t really serving the fans or the characters.

Ultimate End does help the conflict of interest between Earth-616 and the Ultimate Earth.  Bendis tries to give the best of both worlds in the “perfect world” with Miles Morales joining the new world and other duplicate characters being eliminated willy-nilly.  A Skottie Young variant of cover for the series has Bendis doing a big mic drop…if this is his mic drop, it is a pretty sad accomplishment.