There's been a last-minute blitz of house ads for Ultimate Origins.  This is useful, because I hadn't realised we were expected to care all that much.  It's nice of Marvel to tidy that up.

Let's be blunt.  The Ultimate imprint has been in the doldrums for the last couple of years, with falling sales on most of the books.  There's an aura of inertia to the whole thing.  The books already exist and they sell way above the cancellation limit.  Therefore, material must be found to fill the pages.  Ultimate Spider-Man is an exception - that book really does feel like a personal vehicle for Brian Bendis to tell Spider-Man stories.  But otherwise, it's hard to shake the sense that most Ultimate titles exist because they already exist, not because anyone has a particularly clear idea of what to do with them.

So Marvel might have left it a bit late to get around to Ultimate Origins.  The series finally explains the hidden secret of the Ultimate universe, as mentioned... er, in a single issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up a good few years ago.  (Inexplicably, the flashback to that story is captioned "six months ago", which is just weird.)

I was expecting this to be some sort of conspiracy story.  I suppose in some ways it is.  But primarily, this seems to be the story of why super powers exist in the Ultimate Universe at all.  In other words, it's the common origin story that explains why anyone has powers.

I'm not sure you really need to explain this sort of thing.  It's a genre convention that people can have super powers, and with a bit of artistic licence, that's good enough for me.  But the Marvel Universe does have a standing explanation for the existence of super powers.  It's an old Thor story about the Celestials coming to prehistoric Earth and tinkering with the Neanderthals.  It made passable sense in the original context, and it has the advantage of being somewhat vague and mystical.  But it's always struck me as a rather awkward explanation for some books; the further the character veers from the cosmic arena, the more incongruous it becomes to say that he has superpowers thanks to the intervention of a cosmic giant.  And naturally enough, most writers just ignore that stuff and treat the existence of super powers as a ground rule.

I suspect that's what will happen in the Ultimate Universe as well.  Still, if you're going to have a literal origin story for a more street-level universe, then you can't get away with the Celestials.  And so, here we have something different.

Basically, and without giving too much away, that "something" attributes the origin of superpowers to the US government's Super-Soldier Project in the Second World War, so apparently the Ultimate Universe had no superhumans before then.  The suggestion is that they came up with something, accidentally disseminated it, and now you end up with super powers.

As an explanation... well, it's okay.  It's somewhat more in tone with the Ultimate Universe, but also rather more specific and limited than the Celestial stuff.  But of course, it's not enough for the series to provide a workable explanation; it needs to offer a story as well.  This is where the book falters.  Stuff happens, and that stuff makes sense, but none of it really feels like it's leading anywhere especially interesting.  (Ultimate Malcolm Colcord?  He wasn't that exciting the first time round.)

Art comes from veteran Butch Guice.  He's always been solid, and this story shows a nice combination of traditional figures with imaginative layouts.  There's a lovely sequence with the fate of the first prototype super-soldier: a bloke waving a flag around, who gets gunned down in seconds.

So, overall... it's, you know, it's solid.  It doesn't bog down the whole Ultimate Universe in some ludicrous conspiracy theory.  It's actually quite workable as an explanation.  The art's rather good.  But so far, it doesn't make for a particularly compelling story - and the Ultimate imprint no longer has the cachet to make "the origin of superpowers in the Ultimate Universe" an inherently interesting subject.

Rating: B

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