New Ultimate Marvel Universe Project

You do realize that Bendis wasn't the one who made Logan a rapist, correct? That was done by other writers, years before the story in question was written, correct?

Bendis wrote the mind-swap story, but he also wrote Alias, a story which deals with the subject of rape, it's victims and it's after effects pretty thoroughly. While he may have many, many problems as a writer, I don't think "trivializing rape" is one of them. The fact that he was able to make a "bu-dum-tis" line like that as an ending tells me that the way he wrote the story was meant to imply that nothing serious happened. Had something more serious happened, I highly doubt Bendis, who has up till now portrayed rape in a very mature and serious light, would have put it in a comedy story.

Also, I'm literally starring at the page right now; the line is "That thing you tried to do this morning? Lets save that till we're older."

Also, if this argument over "what is/isnt rape?" is all that anybody has to contribute to this thread, then we might just want to lock it at this point, as nobody's getting anywhere with this.

edited 13th Oct '17 11:46:55 AM by Eldritcho

The Ultimate verse was anything but mature.

...Except he did trivialize it. In this story. Because even if nothing is supposed to have happened, he still played attempted rape (and it's attempted rape even if he didn't manage to undo his own pants) as a joke. The whole story builds to that wretched excuse to a punchline, and Wolverine's behaviour is treated as something laughable rather than the deadly serious thing that it is.

A writer who succeeds at portraying and issue in one story can still fail miserably in another. And the author failed miserably in this story—which maybe isn't all that surprising. Lots of theoretically good writers worked on the Ultimate Universe. And yet they all gave in to its sexist status quo.

edited 13th Oct '17 11:50:12 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

In that case, maybe the problem wasn't so much the writers (though they were definitely part of it since they wrote the stories) as it was the editors.

Entirely possible. If editorial says "these are the characters, work with it" a writer can quit or work with what they're being handed.

Still comparing being gay to having sex with your own sister. Still disgusting.

You hear that folks? If you aren't in favour of a rapist being among the protagonists of the story, you're immature. After all, nothing says "I'm an adult" like infringing on the rights of women, right? In fact, you should just go read children's comics, because real men don't let a little thing like the violation of women bother them.

My contribution to this thread is that if someone wanted to try another Marvel alternate universe they need to excise things like "let's make Wolverine a rapist" or "let's have Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver be screwing". There are all sorts of interesting changes one could make to the status quo in an Ultimate Universe style project—changes to race, sexuality, gender, you name it, changes in how characters relate to one another, the removal of old, bad stereotypes, etc, etc. Sadly the actual Ultimate Universe didn't do that, and is sort of a case study in what to avoid.

edited 13th Oct '17 11:54:33 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

The "punchline" of the story was not "attempted rape is funny". If that is what you got from it, then you must have skipped the 40 pages which made up the rest of the story, because the entire arc was literally a big joke of "Wolverine, who is an asshole, in the span of a few hours, almost destroys Peter's social life". Peter is the butt of the joke here, not MJ. Heck, right as MJ and Logan-Pete get to school, and he starts leering at cheerleaders and calling MJ "babe", she throws his costume at his head, calls him an asshole and storms off, so she's clearly not liking this assholish behavior and is having none of it. At the end of the story, real-Pete comes by to apologize to MJ for anything which happened that day and how that wasn't really him, and she embraces him and says that she knows, before giving that final line. The "punchline" is literally on Pete, and it's a knowing joke that MJ herself is making, as since she knows that that wasn't Pete, that line is her intentionally teasing him, and making him (and the audience) wonder "what was Logan trying to do" (which, again, didn't happen, and never would' have happened as it's made very clear in story'' that MJ doesn't take crap from Logan-Pete, and wouldn't have ever let him get away with that)

Now, in order to get things back to the original point of discussion, something I'd have liked to see in an Ultimate Universe:

• Less decompression. While I do like Ultimate Spiderman, coming back to it years later feels very tedious, as aside from the Logan-Pete story, and one or two others, ever story is at least 6 issues long. Some of them, like the Clone Sage, benefit from the length, as there was more than enough story to fill out that kind of runtime; others, however, like the Doc Ock/Kraven story, the Geldoff story, or the Hobgoblin storyline felt horribly padded, and could have easily been cut in half with barely any changes made.

edited 13th Oct '17 12:22:33 PM by Eldritcho

We know what Logan was trying to do. He was trying to rape her. And that's not funny and that's not punchline material, and that anyone thought it was speaks volumes about the level of maturity of the Marvel staff.

Your interpretation of what happened can be entirely correct, and we would still have a punchline involving a rape attempt. Hell, she could have tazed him unconscious, beat him with a baseball bat, and shipped him to Siberia, and we would still have a punchline involving a rape attempt.

That's...not really better. "Imagine if you were replaced by an attempted rapist. Wouldn't his destruction of your social life be hilarious?" Uh, not really, no. In the end that's the problem here—you can't play Ultimate!Wolverine for laughs and the story's attempt at doing so fails hard. There's nothing funny about watching him derail Peter's social life, just like there's nothing funny about what he tries to do to MJ.

If the arc was used to make Logan suffer that'd be one thing, but it wasn't. Instead a character who was already a sexual predator and attempted murderer was used to make a more moral character suffer and got away clean while adding "attempted rape" (at least) to his rapsheet.

We've been asked to drop it by the mods, or at least to stray back into less cringey territory, so I'm going to suggest we leave it here.

I'd add to this—have an end date. The whole idea of the Ultimate Universe was to create something that would be less continuity heavy and in-joke driven than the main 'verse. But after letting it run too long, it became just as continuity heavy and in-joke driven (in addition to its other problems).

Pick an end date, and be ready to pull the plug. That way you achieve your goal, wrap it up, and can then do another relaunch.

Now that this issue has been clarified, let's go back to the original topic, and see how we can bring back the Ultimate universe. The most natural way to do it would be, of course, with the mainstream Ultimates.

The original Ultimates go after the Maker, who kills them, but them others appear, and continue going after him. The Maker decides that the only way to get rid of the Ultimates for good is to recreate their original universe, go to WWII, and kill Steve Rogers and James Howlett. No Steve Rogers -> No Captain America. And no Hulk either (as he became Hulk with a modified form of the serum). No James -> No mutants (no Wasp, and no Giant Man either). And then, no Ultimates. The 2015 Ultimates (alongside Miles Morales) are also trying to stop the Maker. He manages to recreate the Ultimate Universe, but then the fight start. They mess with the controls, and they all fall into the Ultimate Universe.

Once there, they find out that they are not in WWII, but in modern times. Morales grabs a newspaper, and notices the date: it's just a few days before the Ultimatum wave! He provides a recap of the events (at least the parts that he knows), and the Ultimates agree to go to Magneto's base and defeat him. He is captured, jailed again, and then SHIELD starts something that they had delayed a long time since his previous capture: make a trial, find him guilty of several war crimes and crimes against humanity, and then execute him. The mainstream Ultimates, with the job done, get back home. As does Morales: he has his family in the mainstream universe, and he can't be sharing his life with the local Miles Morales anyway. But, before doing so, he interferes in the "Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates" war, saves Peter Parker from being shot by Punisher, and team ups with him against Norman Osbourne. Needless to say, Peter Parker does not die that day.

From there on, the comic books would be:

• The Ultimates: they deal with those other-universe Ultimates, the trial of Magneto and the controversies over his capture and execution.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: Peter Parker continues his adventures from where he left them. The local Miles Morales and his own cast are also added, and they try to figure out which was exactly the deal with that other Miles Morales with Spider-powers who had recently helped him.
• Ultimate Fantastic Four: They fight against the Ultimate Enemy: the Maker (yes, he's a time foreigner now)
• Ultimate X-Men: They try, in vain, to prevent Magneto's execution. After it, it's a never ending fight against the violent mutants that lost their leader. And Wolverine (who is not killed by Magneto in this timeline) has to deal with his newfound paternity with Jimmy Hudson.

I have yet to think how to bring back Nick Fury from the universe of Supreme Power, but surely someone else can think of something.

edited 13th Oct '17 1:37:12 PM by GrigorII

I never said it was better, and I never said it wasn't gross. What my initial point was, and which Ive already proven, is that it was an attempted rape.

And I personally found it hilarious how Peter kept stabbing himself when he was trapped in Logans body.

As for your point of an end date, I don't really know if that's the best solution; while an end point is necessary, putting a date on it could lead to a rushed finale if not planned correctly, or an overly long and tedious finale if they don't have enough story for it.

I think the problem of continuity is actually a lot simpler put — tie-ins and spinoffs. To give a personal example, when i first started reading USM, it was already up to about issue 80. However, I was able to purchase the trades easily enough and follow the story; they were all numerically labeled, the story's shared continuity with each other, but because of the way they were collected the story was easy to follow, despite the number of issues. The parts that did confuse me were the mentions to meeting the Lizard, and Man Thing, and Wolverine before the mind-switch story, which all happened in the spin-off Team-Up book (which was only collected years later and is now long out of print): these were things which were being constantly mentioned and integral to the plot, but were not present in the trades. These are the kind of things which can cause Continuity Lockout, not length.

Suppose that the early story arcs were just a couple issues shorter, and there were no tie-in books; you could have these little 1-issue team-up stories taking place between the longer arcs, and all of the issues are collected in numerical order in the trades (which also are listed in numerical order). A new reader could pick up any issue off the rack, get interested, go pick up volume 1, read it, then pick up volume 2 and read it, then volume 3 and etc, etc. and get completely caught up on the story with no missing pieces.

This is the kind of formula which the Ultimate Universe liked to sell itself on, but in practice was anything but. The Team-Up book was made after only a year, and half of it got retconned away as it was (retcons, another thing that undercuts the whole "new reader friendly" thing), and after they started getting FF, Xmen and the Ultimates books, they stared releasing new spin-off and minis' all over the place. That's what made the continuity so hard to keep track of.

"Keep it simple" isn't always the best rule to live by, but when you're trying to create something from the ground-up, it's golden.

Note: actually, they did follow the simple numbering principle very well on two occasions early on: Ultimate War and Ultimate Six. While yes, both were miniseries, when they were collected in TPB form, they were labeled as UXM vol. 5 and USM vol. 9 respectively, and fit snuggly in continuity with each of their series proper. It actually took me a couple issues while reading Ultimate Six the first time to realize that it wasn't a part of the main series (i mean, the change in artist was obvious, but still).

edited 13th Oct '17 1:29:35 PM by Eldritcho

Trying to claim victory in an argument that we were ordered to shut down by the mods is generally regarded as bad form, given that anyone who might disagree that you've "proven it" is prevented from disputing it. I'll leave it there because I don't want to reignite things.

I don't think it needs to be a hard and fast end date, but I think they do need to decide, before going in, how long they want it to run. They need to say, okay, we're looking to do ten years' worth of material. Or five years' worth. Or fifteen. Or whatever. And then they need to stick to it. While your ideas about simplifying the process are good and absolutely should be implemented, I think that even the simplest, no-frills publishing is eventually going to run into continuity lock out issues should it go on for too long. There comes a point, after all, at which buying the trades in order to understand what's currently going on becomes prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, and if the purpose of the alternate universe is to bring in new readers, then that has to be avoided.

I agree with the majority of what you're saying here, but as I mentioned above, I do think length eventually becomes prohibitive. Even without spin offs, and additional crossover events and the like, there's no way to go back and read twenty or thirty years' worth of material—not quickly and cheaply enough to make getting into the current book possible anyway. Additionally, if part of the idea is to let writers do what they will without years of continuity weighing them down, then sooner or later you have to end the publication line—otherwise writers will find themselves in the position of having years worth of material that's already shaped the characters.

That's why I think having a general idea of how long you want this new project to run is important, because if the goals are 1) bring in new readers who aren't threatened by continuity lockout, and 2) let writers be creative without the shackles of said continuity, then the story has to end before either of those things can become a problem.

One other thing I'd add is this—while letting writers play around with characterization and the like is a good idea, there are outer limits on what you can do. The line may be aimed at attracting new readers, but even those new readers will probably have at least some concept, via pop cultural osmosis, or exposure to animated series, films, and the like, of who these characters are supposed to be. So while some departure from the main universe depictions and characterizations is fine, and even necessary, stretch it too far and you let the cast become unrecognizable and turn off new and old readers alike. As an addendum I'd note that this goes double when it comes to trying to inject grimmer and darker elements into stories and characters that aren't particularly built to hold them and while a character becoming unrecognizable is bad, a character becoming an unrecognizable asshole is so, so much worse. There's nothing wrong with trying to make a story more mature, but you have to actually make it, you know, more mature, and sex and violence (or sexual violence) do not automatically equate with maturity—handled badly they just leave the story more juvenile than ever. And of course if the goal is to attract newer, and presumably, younger readers, then some darker elements may in fact be counterproductive to that goal.

...That's not the original topic. The original topic, per the OP was how to create a new alternate universe, in the vein of the Ultimate Universe, but as an all new continuity with none of Ultimate Marvel's baggage. The poster asked for ideas on how to create a new 'verse, not on how to resurrect the old Ultimate continuity.

Yes, I know, and that leads us to my original post: the Ultimate universe is perfect as it was made (plots, art style, characters, setting, tone of stories, etc.). We do not need a new one. If you want to have an alternate view of the Marvel Universe, the resurrection of the Ultimate universe is the way to go. Why go through all the trouble of creating a "Ultimate Universe 2.0", if the original worked so well and is ripe for the republishing?

How about, the original was far from perfect and just starting back into it would go against the idea of creating a series without the continuity lock-out longstanding comics suffer from?

Continuity lock-out is only a problem when the narrative makes it a problem. It was a problem back in the 1990s, in the pre-Ultimate Marvel years, when comic books were filled with asterisks and little boxes saying "See Uncanny X-Men #234", "See Wolverine #55", "See X-Force #30", "See Wolverine Meets the Harlem Globetrotters #5", etc; and you had to read them all to understand what the hell was going on. If a story is self-contained and devoid of such references, continuity lock-out is not a problem. I can take a modern issue of Jessica Jones and I don't need any other comic to understand the story. Or perhaps just the previous one if it's a story of several episodes, but that's it, I'm not required to be familiar with the old "Alias" comic books or her time alongside Luke in the New Avengers. That's one of the great changes introduced by Ultimate Marvel, that was eventually adopted by comics at large. Otherwise, nobody would be buying Marvel Comics at all, as they are set in the mainstream Marvel Universe, with several decades of continuity.

Not really. Lock-out is usually only really a concern for fledgling comic readers. Once one is accustomed to just picking up and reading whatever, whenever, it really doesn't matter to most. New readers will sometimes pick up a #1 and expect there to be nothing to know at all before that point. Many new readers aren't going to know that they can pick up Spiderman #789 without worrying about what came before. Even then, though, there is lock-out. The comics just don't try to actively sell their predecessors and contemporaries as hard as they used to.

edited 14th Oct '17 8:16:25 AM by Zeromaeus

So first things first—your posts are off topic. The OP was not talking about resurrecting the Ultimate Universe. They were talking about building a better alternate universe.

Second off—the Ultimate Universe was far from perfect or we wouldn't be having this conversation. There's a reason the series was cancelled—that reason being that a whole lot of readers were no longer interested in reading about these shallow parodies of characters they'd once liked. When Galactus hit the Ultimate Universe, there was a massive swathe of the fan base that cheered for him to devour it and put the whole 'verse out of its misery. That's not a sign of its enduring popularity.

Basically, you want to start an Ultimate Universe fan thread, more power to you. This ain't the place for it.

Perfection does not require Hundred Percent Adoration Rating. There's always going to be someone out there complaining about any given work, for one reason or another. In fact, Quality by Popular Vote is not the way quality is actually measured.

Still not the point of the thread. Maybe take it to one of the Marvel threads? Or go make one for Ultimate Marvel if it doesn't exist?

And for the love of god, stop trying to knock the people who didn't like the Ultimate 'verse. Quality may not be measured by popular vote...but it's not measured by the amount of edge someone tries to put in the comic either, and there's plenty of legitimate complaints to level at the line.

edited 14th Oct '17 11:21:03 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

I have already made my proposal at post #60. It would be fine if you stop complaining about side issues, and state your opinion about it.

You didn't make a proposal at #60, you talked about resurrecting the original Ultimate Universe. Which is not the topic of the thread.

The result is a new Ultimate universe, as requested. It is basically the original one, but with an event that makes plots go into new directions. And it includes the Ultimates of the mainstream universe, so yes, it is a combination. It is precisely what the OP proposed (read the first post if you forgot about it).

...Yeah that's not what the OP said (they said building a new universe that incorporates some elements of the Ultimate one, the mainstream one, etc with the majority of the ideas being new and coming from posters in the thread). By your own admission this is just the Ultimate Universe with one or two minor changes.

Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

What about you? We have heard a lot about the things that you do not like and that you would not include. Which is your proposal? What would you do, if Marvel asked you to manage this project?