Nightmare Fuel / Ultimate Marvel

• Ultimate Spider-Man
• The Ultimates
• Ultimate X Men
• Ultimatum

• For those who haven't seen that version, Ultimate Galactus (known in this universe as Gah Lak Tus) has, shall we say, a different method of operation from the mainstream version. Instead of a giant humanoid in shiny purple and a big-ass hat showing up and declaring with much Purple Prose that his eating your planet will ultimately serve some higher cosmic purpose, the Ultimate version is truly scary, so much so that the mere warning about its approach inspired world-wide nightmares affecting the entire human race, and millions of mass suicides. The truly nasty stuff comes in the third volume, when Gah Lak Tus actually starts doing things to the world it intends to eat. Like sending "silver angel" heralds to inspire suicide/murder cults, broadcasting irresistible psychic waves that drive you insane with fear, and spreading an Ebola-like virus, all so that the task of stripping the Earth bare of life is made easier. Then finally, when everything else is dead, Gah Lak Tus itself arrives: a hundred-thousand-mile-wide swarm of skyscraper-sized mechanical eating machines, each one dropping from orbit like a bomb, and implacably boring into the lifeless ground and grinding the entire planet apart from the crust inward. It's not for nothing that the final volume is called Ultimate Extinction.
  • The true nightmare fuel from that story was Silver Surfer's teeth. *shudder*
  • And as for the cosmic purpose Gah Lak Tus normally has? Why does Ultimate Big-G need to eat planets? Simple it needs fuel to get to the next planet. Even worse, Gah Lak Tus despises all organic life and wants every living thing to die as painfully as possible.
  • That all said, the mainstream Galactus is far from a puppy. A skyscraper-sized star god who can go anywhere in the universe he pleases, unstoppable and powerful enough to vaporize entire solar systems as if they're nothing. He might get hit with The Worf Effect regularly, but more often than not he rebounds from it and reminds everyone why he's feared across the universe as a world-ending force of nature. He also regularly has a Flying Brick of godly power to follow him around, and it's VERY rare for them to be as compassionate as the Silver Surfer.
  • And let's not get even started when Galactus and Gah Luk Tus fused into one being.
    • And why did that happen? Because when Galactus got transported into the Ultimate universe, Gah Luk Tus tried to consume him, but failed to even scratch him. The fusion dance was a last ditch attempt of Gah Luk Tus to to save itself