It's amazing how one badly written story can ruin an entire comic book universe for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Might want to add one more number to the counter. Ultimate Daredevil was killed OFFSCREEN and his corpse was shown in a tie in

Soooo, did anyone bother getting Namor out of that tank? Ultimate Universe ended in 2016 and last I checked he's still stuck there. Did someone at least change the water?

Nick Fury's line about "if you get out of hand" is especially funny if you've actually READ Ultimate X-Men. In that book's very first story arc, Magneto attacks Washington DC with an army of Sentinels, flattens the city, torches the White House, and tries to execute the President on live TV (and has stripped him nude for some reason). And THAT'S not out of hand enough for you, Samuel?!

Heh... The "Granny Goodness!" joke will always be funny.

Religious Magneto is the stuff of nightmares. That being said, if he was a Holocaust survivor in the Ultimate Universe, I can understand how comparing him to Hitler might through a maniac like him over the deep end.

The only good thing that came from Ultimatum was Ultimatum: Spider-man Requiem. Which at least served to give Jonah some character development.

I guess "Can't kill you unless I'm willing to die" is Loeb's poorly-worded way of saying "I'll kill you even if it means getting myself killed in the process."

Important question: why were the three heroes confronting Erik the ones completely metal-based? We have Hawkeye with metal arrows, we have Iron Man in his metal suit (usually it's demagnetized for his fights with Magneto but he took stupid pills before this story), we have Cyclops, whose visor is suddenly made of metal despite fighting against Magneto on a regular basis, and Wolverine with his metal skeleton.

The difference between Crisis on Infinite Earths and all the other reboots or attempted reboots like this one? Crisis on Infinite Earths is Awesome, and actually celebrates the DCU as a whole. Most of the deaths in that story were heroic sacrifices like Supergirl's or happened while the heroes were trying to rescue civilians like with what happened to Kole and the earth 2 Huntress and Robin.

Actually, a movie with Samuel L. Jackson as waving a gun around and saying mo-fo a lot would be something I'd pay to see. I imagine it being called something like "Samuel L. Jackson Gets S*** Done."

The only Ultimate universe comic I ever really read was Ultimate Spider-Man, and I liked it. Peter's life was rough, but he bounced back for the most part. I had no idea the rest of the Ultimate universe going on around him was so messed up...!

Funny how Linkara's bit about how you should have a plan when you do a reboot applies to the New 52 as well.

Perhaps the real Ultimatum was the heroes we killed along the way.

Magneto's entire motivation is basically, "Welcome to die."

15:12 - 15:29. The greatest joke ever told on At4W is born...

7:47 Dang it! He should've said, "If you're GOD, who should be merciful? You...? Or ME!?!" Then, Magneto could just "kill" him right there and say, "I don't know? Why don't you tell me?"

I just realized something: how the hell did Magneto even kill Wolverine? I mean, the comic says he ripped the adamantium from his skeleton, but that's happened on at least one occasion in the main Marvel universe, and he was fine, mostly because that wouldn't destroy any of his cells, he'd just regrow his bones.

The grand, long-term continuity solution: cycles. Start it out with "Universe A," or some other easy nomenclature. Signify clearly on the book that this takes place in Universe A. Use characters, either new or old, and tell stories with them. Five years in, when continuity starts getting dense, start Universe B for new readers. It can use the same characters, or all new ones; the point is, it is free from the continuity of Universe A. Five years after that, wrap up Universe A, switch to Universe B as the "main continuity," and start Universe C for new readers. Universe A needn't be destroyed; in fact, it could end with a "To be continued..." and in the future may be, as limited series and one-shots set in Universe A (or B, or C) carry on the stories for fans of that series. Repeat the cycle ad infinitum. This system not only gives new readers an easy in, it gives older readers a chance to enjoy their continuity without any threat of the company screwing around with it for editorial reasons. Instead of having vast swathes of continuity swept away in reboots, or characters killed of in event comics, they can still exist, there for the reader to enjoy, and for new creators to play with without sacrificing the dynamic of the current comic in the name of nostalgia. For comparison's sake, let's look at the Batman films. Like Adam West version? Great, here's the shows, the movie, and hey! Even a continuation comic. Burton fan? You've got the films, the planned (but sadly never made) continuation comic, etc. Nolan? Go for it. Giving readers continuing cycles of fresh continuity without damaging the old continuity gives us the best of both worlds; had Marvel planned it right, this could have been what their mainstream and Ultimate universes ushered in. Just, for the love of God, never allow the universes to cross-over. Just... just don't.

I kinda wish it was Granny Goodness XD

honestly, I think a book about how the X-Men got started without Prof. X would be kinda interesting.

Ongoing continuity has it's place, but so do planned endings. If a character was created to convey a certain message, then the story should end once that message is conveyed. For example, Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist was created to show the importance of sacrifice and once that point was made, the series ended. Anything else would be superfluous.

I am still a casual comic reader but I pretty much did what Linkara said. I just read random comics that captured my interest. Continuity always used to confuse me alot but now I just track down which hero and arc interests me the most.

Funnily enough, I'm 90% sure that in the classic universe, having the adamantium removed actually sent Wolverine's healing factor into overdrive

You know Linkara Jeff Loeb made Ultimatum when he was still grieving over his son's death and that might be why he made Ultimatum like he did. He wasn't thinking straight but then again no one would be if their child passed away.

The door jokes gets me every time.

The real problem with The Ultimate Universe is these mythical "new readers". They don't exist. The comic book distribution model created a very insular audience. They have no way to promote comics to a wider audience because animation and movies are there to sell toys, not comic books. Comic book shops are increasingly hard to find and few were ever all that convenient to get to. It's not like you'd pass one between Gamestop and The Gap in a mall. There's very little chance of a passerby seeing something interesting and coming in to take a look. You already have to be predisposed to come into a comic shop. When you add in the cover price to the amount of story in a single issue, you have another problem. They are a terrible value for your entertainment dollar.

Fun Fact: Mutants in the main Marvel Universe were created when God-like beings called The Celestials genetically altered cavemen.

Does every single event in the ultimate universe end with some random villain turning up and proclaiming that they were the mastermind behind everything up to this point for realsies? You know for this to have all been part of mysterious woman's plan that means she had to predict Doom's absurdly overcomplicated plan, which in turn relied on Doom predicting Ultron's absurdly overcomplicated plan, AND she had to predict that Ultron, Magneto and Doom would be all be foiled. They just keep adding more layers of stupid.

Your right Linkara, the challenge of a writer designing a universe for a comic sounds like fun! :D

Granny Goodness: Granny always was a great shot with a pistol...

WTF? Too many deaths, not enough heroism, just a snuff film (of sort). I'm surprised that they didn't do anything related to time travel. . . it was a waste!

Another problem with the "ripping the adamantium off of his skeleton" bit, Magneto actually did that in the regular Marvel universe, and it didn't kill him. It just made his claws bone again.

Wolverine should've said "If you're God, then I'M THE DEVIL!"

I love how the people in charge of the Ultimate Universe were trying to save themselves the backlash by saying that they were planning to continue the Ultimate world after Ultimatum when they said that it was supposed to be the big event comic to end it. Sometimes I just get a kick out of the bullsh!t these people come up with.

I don't get the point of keeping Sabretooth alive if you are gonna kill Wolverine

ultimatum was truly a mess of a story . I have a theory: Jeph loeb was an unfercover agent for dc. dc previously tried their own ultimate marvel with all star batman and superman. dc, knowing that the ultimate univese was well loved sent jeph loeb to marvel a lot earlier. because of this, he made good books like the "color" series. then jeph loeb wrote ultimates3, ultimate power and then ultimatum. i think that this theory is stupid ,but at least it's better than ultimatum

The Rape the Brain line was a callback to I think the first 6 Ultimate X-Men books, where Xavier does indeed brainwash Magneto. Like, completely. Make Dr Light (Male and Evil) into a joke character, but properly done. Everything that made Magneto Magneto sealed away. This was something I always found strange about Ultimate Universe, how it was ultimately quite mean-spirited. The heroes are often assholes or psychopaths, the villains as well, the government (at least the American one) needs to be dragged behind a shed and shot and the sooner someone has all of SHIELD executed the better. Overbearing surveillance state, being a criminal for occurences beyond your control etc, no thank you. In a way I enjoyed Ultimatum, because it was the culmination of a meanspirited universe. The whole universe just bled edginess. As a final issue, wiping the slate clean from all the neddless edge? It could have worked. A universe where mainstay names aren't there. That's interesting, how does the dynamic between the various mutant/hero/villain groups change without Magneto and Xavier, without village bicycle Wolverine, without Thor to stop Loki, without various other Avengers, with the F4 non-existent, Spider Man a respected hero, there was a lot of potential in such a story. Sadly, they wasted it all.

I loved your introduction. I started reading comics more regularly with Blackest Night then moved on to Geoff Johns' Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps and Batman Hush and Grant Morrison's run in Batman. They were decently self-contained and continuity nods would go over my head or be easily explained with the internet. Even in Blackest Night I would look up some backstory and fun stories.

Why did Magneto not already know about mutants? In Ultimate Origins, he was the son of the one of the scientists who created the first mutant (which is Wolverine). He knew full well in Origins that mutants were created that way. Did he forget or something?

By the way, the woman Ultimate Quicksilver is Ultimate Moira MacTaggert, Ultimate Charles Xavier's ex-wife! Just thought I'd mention it for anyone who was curious!

The ending to this comic disgusts me.

Considering Joe Quesada's history with ruining characters in just one story, Ultimatum is the perfect dedication to him.

I wonder why they picked Magneto of all people to be the final boss? If I was in charge of writing this story I'd have chosen Apocalypse instead Mr. Sinister resurrects Apocalypse who then steals Storm's weather powers and uses them to create mass floods and earthquakes, forest fires etc as part of his whole "survival of the fittest" thing Just spit-balling ideas here but this should have been way different

Really? Xavier was kind of straightforward with his ultimatum: help him stop Magneto or he will murder you with his mind bullets. Also, no comment on Xavier's willingness to kill to further his agenda?

some homeless person digging through the garbage is going to be really really happy when he finds that.... and then really really disgusted

Well if its that easy for the thing to crush Doom´s head then why didn't he do that earlier?

Why is Cap alive? According to the rules Hela put out, if one person gets to live, someone must take their place. Both Valkyrie and Cap were dead, but only Thor stayed behind. Why did Cap get to go?

0:59 That is exactly how I got into the first Superhero comic I ever bought. Was just in second grade or so, picked up an issue of Huntress at the local convenient store and thumbed through a few pages. I was intrigued and so asked my mom if I could use my allowance on it. Since then she's been a favorite character of mine and I've been a comic reader.

12:47 Yes it is incredibly lame. It also doesn't make any sense given the fact that Ultimate Wolverine fought alongside Ultimate Captain America in World War Two and Wolverine still had his healing factor. Also the Ultimate Universe has it's own version of Apocalypse who still has the Ancient Egypt backstory. I could go into the other continuity problems like Wanda and Pietro's mother not being Magda in this universe and Nick Fury only using Magneto's "weakness" now when Magneto has tried to destroy the world twice before Ultimatum but this comment is already too long and rambly.

Whenever I watch your videos about how comics attempt to deal with their massive amounts of continuity, and how event comics often fail to be coherent and can screw over other titles that were running at the same time, I remember that the first Marvel comic I ever read was a direct sequel to two titles I hadn't read and was tied into three major crossover events over only seventeen issues, but was written in such a way as to be a perfectly cromulent standalone, so I picked up its predecessors and keep an eye out for its successors. Watching these videos really brings home just how rare that kind of writing seems to be.

apparently wolverine being willing to die somehow makes magneto for get that he has the power of magnetism for a few minutes

Continuity Alarm is best companion. Always have a good laugh when the alarm chimes in, like during the first part of the countdown review when you were talking about Jason Todd. Actually haven't heard a peep from him for a while. Is the alarm getting debugged?

My teachers always said to not make a title until you knew the story. Think I finally understand why

I really love story's with loads of continuity to them. I don't see it as locking me out, but as motivation to go back and follow through the story, I recall that is how I got into AT4W. Also, while I hate sexual fanservice I do love the kind that reference the franchise and continuity like the kind Zero Punctuation attacked in a later Monkey Island game, it's just another treat for either sticking with a franchise or for going back and seeing the prior stuff.

10 years of the finale of ultimatum

So with Ultimatum done and dusted, let's see who's managed to come back from the dead *Grabs glasses and begins to read a list* ahem. Jamie Madrox (he's dead now), Psylocke, Thor (So what was the whole point of him sacrificing himself), Havok, Captain Britain (technically as someone else is holding the mantle) oh and of course Doctor Doom.

I look forward to Linkara eventually reviewing Spider-Verse (and Spidergeddon sometime after, since we already know it's more of the same) and raking it over the coils for being the exact same damn story as this one. Hell, he could even copy and paste large chunks of his script from this review into that one, changing only a few nouns in the process.

Right when I thought, "Hey! Where's the opening credits?," they came on.

@0:09-0:15 Continuity Alarm: EHHH EHHH EHHH EHHH! Linkara: You can't DO THAT RIGHT NOW, it's the introduction

The first minute of a half is amazing advice on how to start reading comics. I am one of those people that does care a lot about conitinutiy want to know the backstory of the characters. However, if you find a story that you enjoy and is good then it doesn't really matter if you don't know all of the backstory. I finally learned with Green Lantern comics in The New 52. It was pretty obvious they were still continuing continuity from pre-Flash Point that I didn't know many details of but I am really glad I stuck with all of the Green Lantern and Red Lantern books. It got to the point where I was just enjoying the stories that were being told and they do sometimes just give enough background information to understand the characters better. I also have done with with the newest Ghost Rider series that I think is really good where Johnny Blaze is the king of Hell and I just kept reading despite not knowing the backstory because like I said the story and characters are good enough to where I didn't really care anymore about the backstory leading into it.

Apparently, rumour has it that 'Ultimatum' is going to form part of a storyline in a future MCU movie. Kevin Feige and co sure have their work cut out for them on this one.

Wow, after all the talk around X-Men '97 its ... refreshing to see the origin of the X-Men acknowledged without any controversy.

It funny to watch this now as DC just nuked the end of Crisis on Infinite Earth with Continuum which restored the DC multiverse and Marvel is doing Secret Wars (again) which seems to their own version of Crisis...and I waiting to to see how long before they manage to screw up whatever (if anything) it was supposed to achieve.

Well, Cyclops did say he wanted to help Magneto...HELP HIM TO MEET HIS MAKER!

Quicksilver looks so old at the end

I never realized till thi review that Cyclop COULD HAVE CLOSED HIS DAMN EYES, HE HAS EYELIDS!! Is funny as some things get worst and worst the more you explore them

That's ridiculous, I wouldn't be reading comics today without DC's New 52. The internet helps, but it's not enough.

The door probably should have had a lock and that’s why Doom wonders how the person go in...

from what i can remember(probably not going to word it right) about the deaths in the ultimate universe, was that they were meant to be permanent , with only recently some new writers bringing back characters, like peter, and saying the reason he's back was because of Osborn's serum granting him, Osborn, and possibly others injected with it, immortality

Maybe the title should have been "Ultimate Shit"

I would love to see "Death of Spider-man". Think this would be interesting for many of us.

Why is Hawkeye’s solution for everything to shoot people in the eye?!!?

One of my favourite reviews...Linkara is awesome :)

Your speech about reboots and continuity has inspired me to write a story about a character who’s aware that they’re a fictional character and has an existential crisis as a result of it, not helping is that they’re universe is constantly being rebooted every few years, way more than necessary. When they realize the reason that their gods reboot the universe is anything but generous (aka money), they set out to get revenge on their creators and/or awful writers who were never the original creators but became the writers just to make a quick buck and/or executives who only care about monetary gain and nothing else.

This is observation from a recent video about Magneto, but it should probably be brought up in context with the reveal of mutants origin in Ultimatum...it is wildly (unintentionally) yikes that Ultimatum says mutants are the result of an experiment given what they traditionally are meant to stand for in Marvel

Rumor is Marvel planning to adapt the story for the MCU. Unless they do a massive overhaul, I really doubt it. It'd be like DC adapting Countdown in the movie or TV universes.

I think that the biggest takeaway from this storyline piece is that the NSD is not human, since the entity calls him ninja, not human.

Not sure why the Ultimate Spider-Man comics weren’t used as an outlet for that older dated stuff the writers wanted to do with Peter instead of doing One More Day

Apparently the ultimate marvel universe is still alive and not dead after all

this is my assumption and this is an old comic (im rewatching these videos) but isnt cyclops' visor made out of a plastic based polymer and heavy duty glass, so stuff like what magneto does in this video CANT happen? and if it is made of metal, THEN WHY!!? the X-men are the ones constantly fighting magneto, and just bringing wolverine with his metal skeleton is dumb enough, why would they have ANYTHING made of metal?

If there's one thing you can always count on with Marvel it's humans and the government being monsters and racists.

Just remember everyone, the MCU is based on the Ultimate Universe and *THIS* was it's climax in the comics, so...

Going over The event comics month playlist because I'm curious about a lot of comic stuff I don't know that much about. So that's why I'm leaving a comment on a many years old video.... But like.... Isn't magneto a ridiculously hard counter to wolverine? Every time I've seen them do anything in the same scene where they were opposed to each other magneto knocks him around instantly. How did wolverine get the chance to land so many hits?

At 10:20, what the hell happened to Mystique's spine?

So basically the way they tried to get more readers was to kill of wolverine, brilliant plan, there is no way they could have prevented his death in anyway

Don't you *DARE* mentioning Zero Hour to me.

that would have actually been a good twist if granny goodness did it. or at least a better one

"Wost. Scientist. Ever." I think we all already knew that about Reed. It was him or Hank Pym.

17:02 lol, wow. "Thank you for starting the ultimate universe...so that I could shit all over it with this story." "Ugly", "mean-spirited", and "idiotic" describe Ultimatum perfectly.

The fuck was that ? The only thing it did was kill a lot of characters in mean spirited and mocking ways and make the universe even more needlessly grim that before !

If i was linkara i would have thrown that trade out Comicron-1's airlock and vaporized it with the main gun

IT'S ALWAYS GRANNY GOODNESS

9:20 Wolverine is Cell?

1:53- Joe Quesada: Make Spider-Man Great Again.

Extremely strong magnetic fields apparently can cause some damage to the human body, but it mostly just causes brief bouts of nausea and dizziness. Super powerful magnetic fields (stronger than we'll likely ever see on Earth) could in theory cause nerve damage, but you'd have to be subjected to the field for a long time to get even mild effects. But no, it will not fry the human body. They don't produce energy like that, they just cause certain metals to realign according to the field's waves.

16:05 - Wait a sec, he shot Cyclops with the same bullet that they used to shoot the Scarlet Witch? How? Wasn't it a special bullet programmed to seek out the Scarlet Witch's DNA? And even if he got around that, how did Quicksilver manage to retrieve the bullet from the scene of the crime?

To be fair, comtroling the circuitry in the Iron Man suit could possibly be done through magnetism

And Brain M. Bendis created Jessica Jones later.

Ultimatum was utter trash. Pointless death after pointless death and the stupid man made mutants plot point make it even worse.