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Over in Ultimate X-Men, Spider-Man
moves on and Daredevil turns up in his place as "Blockbuster"
enters the third chapter.
The flaw with this storyline is fairly
obvious - it's the unashamed blatancy with which Bendis is
reeling in the guest stars and reviving the somewhat arbitrary
style of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. For Wolverine
to meet up with Spider-Man isn't too much of a stretch since
they've got some degree of history; for him to track down the
Black Widow was broadly justified in plot terms. But for
him then to blunder upon Daredevil in the course of the same
storyline does begin to strain credibility a touch.
Still, this isn't really the sort of story
where credibility is a top priority; Brian Bendis and David
Finch are really using this story as an excuse to have fun in
the playpen of the Ultimate universe and throw in everything
they can get away with. By Bendis' standards, in
particular, it's very heavy on the action sequences, which
fill a large chunk of the issue. Not a problem, though,
since they're good little sequences - Finch does a fabulous
job with Spider-Man trying to swing up to a helicopter and
realising halfway that catapulting himself towards a load of
whirring metal blades might not have been such a fabulous idea
after all.
Things get a little more awkward when
Bendis shifts back to his normal tone near the end.
Having cornered Wolverine, the unnamed villain goes into a
spiel about the iniquity of somebody like him becoming a
celebrity. The implication is that she's after revenge
because of one of Wolverine's past kills, arising from
something before his mental blocks. Given that Wolverine
was in fact an outright villain in the Ultimate continuity
when first introduced, this works fine as a motivation; the
difficulty is that the story makes a grinding change of gear
between flippant explosions and more normal Bendis-style
writing. Both scenes, individually, are done just fine;
it's putting them together in one story that begins to look a
little skewed.
Still, good fun overall - and Finch is
continuing to impress me with his artwork.
Rating: A
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