Millar's new Ultimate mini project?

ThatOneGuy

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we had a thread going on this at the old forum and it seemed interesting enough to continue here...

UltimateE said:
Brian Michael Bendis confirmed on his message board that Mark Millar is planning a new Ultimate miniseries for next year and said it's a "really a great idea." Bendis said he's got Secret War next year and another "big thing," alluding to not having any special Ultimate projects going on (and possibly why he's now not co-writing Ult. X-Men 46-49).

Any thoughts or hopes on what this might be? Could we be getting another Ultimate-ized character?

UltimateE said:
Spoiler space!

The Wizard preview for the Ultimate titles in 2004 says that in Ultimates vol. 2 the first arc (2 issues) deals with the trial of the Incredible Hulk. At first I thought that meant Banner was going to jail, but of course that's not necessarily the case. If he is exonerated or pardoned or something he could be let back into society, especially if he ends up saving the world in Ultimates #13.

cqb101 said:
It would be cool if this big project turned out to be an Ultimate Galactus mini with the FF, and SIlver Surfer or something.

UltimateE said:
This is clipped from Mark Millar's interview at Silver Bullet from 1/15/04 at http://silverbulletcomicbooks.com/features/107419514831683.htm

TIM: Are you ever afraid that the next Ultimate series is going to be one too many, and that the concept may be close to running its course?

MILLAR: Are you kidding? Each one launches bigger than the last. Spidey did around 65K, X-Men did around 140K, The Ultimates did 175K and now Fantastic Four has ram-raided the 200K barrier. The minute they start to go down is when the bubble has burst, but the honest truth is that people seem to be getting a little more into the Ultimate stuff all the time. Since it launched in 2000, it's been the most profitable line of books in the entire industry and a consistent group of top ten sellers. I have one other Ultimate book I need to do, by the way. It'll be close to a year away, but it's the one book I've done which I think might break the 300K barrier. I started putting notes together on the plane back from New York last month.

MARKISAN: Can you reveal any further details on the "one other Ultimate book" that you need to do?

MILLAR: Ultimate Ultimate line. It completely trashes these three years of confusing continuity and restarts the whole thing over to attract a brand new audience.

MARKISAN: Interesting.. as you say, the Ultimate line keeps growing and drawing in more readers each year. But how will the line continue to remain fresh down the road? As the universe expands, obviously a whole new continuity is being developed. How will Marvel, and the writers on the Ultimate books, ensure continuity with the line and avoid problems like say, the regular Marvel universe books have generated?

MILLAR: I love this question because the answer is so simple; the Ultimate line will always be 40 years less complicated than the Marvel Universe because it's 40 years younger. It's a very important tool for reeling in new readers and, once we've got them, we can get them hooked on more refined, hardcore product. I don't just mean Marvel, of course. I know people whose first comic was Ultimate X-Men and now they're reading Wanted, Global Frequency and all that stuff, and this pleases me enormously. We're essentially drug-dealers who give you some cheap hits until you're hooked and, before you know it, you're killing people for money to buy crack.

UltimateE said:
that one guy said:
unless...he is doing something about all the weirdness that is ultimate marvel team-up... :shock:

That's the only thing I can think of that would need to be addressed, is all the references to the Fantastic 4 and Reed Richards. The Fantastic 4 were referenced in Ultimates #2 I think it was, plus in Ultimate Six the collars that the five villains wore were based on the "Richards gene nullifier."

Also should be interesting to see if they address the claims in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #9 that Reed invented CDs, joysticks, surround sound stereo, MTV2, Twinkies, boxer shorts, rack & pinion steering, etc. :D

TrueBlue said:
Hello :D ...Just thought I'd chime in on what I've heard.

Mark Millar has claimed in the past that he plans on doing something more with Charles Xavier's son Proteus in the future. Proteus is a very powerful mutant who you might remember from earlier in Ultimate X-Men (around issue #15 or so). He can project himself into other people's bodies. Now of course since Millar is no longer writing Ultimate X-Men he couldn't bring Proteus back there, so if he is still going to do it a mini would be next, since I don't think he'd bring him into Ultimates. He also had some kind of plans for Rogue, although I'm not sure what exactly.

Brian Michael Bendis is not involved in this project AFAIK but has claimed that Geldoff from the X-Men crossover arc in Ultimate Spiderman would be involved in some very big events in the Ultimate universe. He is, as you know, from Latveria, and by the time this crossover take place Ultimate Fantastic 4 will be established, including Doom/Victor Van Damme...so if Doom takes hold of Latveria and maybe starts getting into genetic warfare, maybe the Ultimates get involved, enlist other Ultimate heroes (even the X-Men)...well you can see where I'm going with this. ;-)

in case no one read the letters page of ultimate spidey 54, someone wrote in asking about ultimate infinity gauntlet and ultimate onslaught :roll: and brian michael bendis said "millar has something huge coming in december."

i think we can count out ultimate nightmare, since it is coming in august and is by warren ellis.
 
Warren Wllis said in his newsletter that he was "picking up the slack on something Millar was originally slated for but didn't have time to do." However, Millar answered a post by me at MillarWorld that he was never going to do Nightmare, so...make of that what you will.

Anyways, if rumors are to be believed, Millar's year-end mini will be an Ultimate Captain America series with art by MK4's Steve McNiven.
 
I'v read some of the stuff Millar's said about this mini, and I wasn't under the impression it was an Ultimate Captain America series. Millar has said things about how this series will sort out the continuity problems within Ultimate, how it will do away with the confusing continuity that has built up. He also referred to it as an "Ultimate Ultimate" series. Maybe that's what the UC stood for in that code on Millar World. Not "Ultimate Cap", but "Ultimate Continuity" or something. Ofcourse, the story could be a Captain America story and still do all of these things.
 
ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY!!! ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY!!!

It's been mentioned before by Kong in USM #14, about all the mutants and superheroes popping up, and supposedly that's what Bruce Banner was referring to when he was talking to Spider-Man in UMT #3, and also Arthur Molekevik in UF4 somewhere...

Anyway, that does sound like a good title for a mini series.
 
ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY!!! ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY!!!

It's been mentioned before by Kong in USM #14, about all the mutants and superheroes popping up, and supposedly that's what Bruce Banner was referring to when he was talking to Spider-Man in UMT #3, and also Arthur Molekevik in UF4 somewhere...

Anyway, that does sound like a good title for a mini series.
And it all comes full circle, huh?
 
I wouldn't be surprised if Secret War was involved. That 616 Fury appearance in UMTU was no coincidence. 8)
 
I wouldn't be surprised if Secret War was involved. That 616 Fury appearance in UMTU was no coincidence. 8)

SKRULLS!

Obviously the Ultimate Universe is a fake replica of the real universe that the Skrulls use for training their spies.
 

Bass said:
But I'm sure that Galactus' aftermath is as well planned as its build-up, although it will be different.

That thread hurts when you consider how ****ty Ultimate Gah Lak Tus turned out to be. :(

Ugh. I honestly can't stand the thought that I, in my own spare time, have come up with a more believable, insightful origin to the Ultimate universe than what the 'masterminds' of the universe have come up with in the 7 years of professional writing they've done. That may sound immodest, but at the moment, that's how low the Ultiverse feels to me.
 
That thread hurts when you consider how ****ty Ultimate Gah Lak Tus turned out to be. :(

Ugh. I honestly can't stand the thought that I, in my own spare time, have come up with a more believable, insightful origin to the Ultimate universe than what the 'masterminds' of the universe have come up with in the 7 years of professional writing they've done. That may sound immodest, but at the moment, that's how low the Ultiverse feels to me.

Let's buy Marvel Comics.
 
That thread hurts when you consider how ****ty Ultimate Gah Lak Tus turned out to be. :(

Ugh. I honestly can't stand the thought that I, in my own spare time, have come up with a more believable, insightful origin to the Ultimate universe than what the 'masterminds' of the universe have come up with in the 7 years of professional writing they've done. That may sound immodest, but at the moment, that's how low the Ultiverse feels to me.

But the thing with your idea is once you do Ultimate Galactus, where else is there to go? I mean if everything was building up for this point what can you do next? Gah Lak Tus would have to be the last thing in the UU. But I too am sincerly pissed, I think back to these days of speculations of such great potential stories to only to realize that most storylines have been executed in such horribly crappy ways.

****ing Bendis
 
Let's buy Marvel Comics.

:rockon:

But the thing with your idea is once you do Ultimate Galactus, where else is there to go? I mean if everything was building up for this point what can you do next? Gah Lak Tus would have to be the last thing in the UU. But I too am sincerly pissed, I think back to these days of speculations of such great potential stories to only to realize that most storylines have been executed in such horribly crappy ways.

****ing Bendis

Here here. They stripmined 616 Marvel, and have no more fuel for Ultimate Marvel.

As for where you go - this is where the NEXT architects of the Ultimate universe crop up and start planning the NEXT 5 years.

The way I see it, is it would be the "Ultimate Marvel Movie". Each Star Wars movie took what, 3 years to make? Why not the same for this type of mini? The first five years focus on this event: Galactus arrives on Earth. The next five could focus on this event: The Human-Mutant war. The next five could focus on this event: The Infinity Gauntlet. The major stories of 616 or brand-new ones being a huge continuing mega-series, once every five years or so, using the entire resources of the Ultimate universe each time. The trick would be to not to 'top' what came before, but to go differently. For example, if the Galactus event reveals the origins of the species and an extra-terrestrial predator, then the next would be more 'down-to-earth', as such focusing on internecine struggles, warring factions, and more personal story about rights and what not against the backdrop of war. So the next one you go away from war and go more into a quest into strange places looking for ancient artifacts of power. After that you might go from the quest to the violent bloodbath of the Dark Phoenix saga. And so on. The idea is to keep changing the focus of what that mega-series is about, yet using it to keep the Ultimate universe streamlined and cohesive. Could've been cool, maybe.
 
:rockon:



Here here. They stripmined 616 Marvel, and have no more fuel for Ultimate Marvel.

As for where you go - this is where the NEXT architects of the Ultimate universe crop up and start planning the NEXT 5 years.

The way I see it, is it would be the "Ultimate Marvel Movie". Each Star Wars movie took what, 3 years to make? Why not the same for this type of mini? The first five years focus on this event: Galactus arrives on Earth. The next five could focus on this event: The Human-Mutant war. The next five could focus on this event: The Infinity Gauntlet. The major stories of 616 or brand-new ones being a huge continuing mega-series, once every five years or so, using the entire resources of the Ultimate universe each time. The trick would be to not to 'top' what came before, but to go differently. For example, if the Galactus event reveals the origins of the species and an extra-terrestrial predator, then the next would be more 'down-to-earth', as such focusing on internecine struggles, warring factions, and more personal story about rights and what not against the backdrop of war. So the next one you go away from war and go more into a quest into strange places looking for ancient artifacts of power. After that you might go from the quest to the violent bloodbath of the Dark Phoenix saga. And so on. The idea is to keep changing the focus of what that mega-series is about, yet using it to keep the Ultimate universe streamlined and cohesive. Could've been cool, maybe.

We have to remember that at its core, the Ultimate Universe is about the basic nature of its characters. I like that idea for a story structure, but the key to its success or failure is finding a way for the central themes of the story to tie back into the themes of the characters. If the mega-series is about a war between humans and mutants, this war needs to loop directly back into some core value of Peter Parker, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, etc. Otherwise, these characters shouldn't even make an appearance.

I think ideally, we'd have to have each of the main books set along five year plans as well, with each five year plan constituting a major story arc for each of the books, which then dovetails into the mega-event.

What confounds me is that, considering what a sequential and long-term medium comic book writing is, there are few writers who actually have a vision of the big picture.
 
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We have to remember that at its core, the Ultimate Universe is about the basic nature of its characters. I like that idea for a story structure, but the key to its success or failure is finding a way for the central themes of the story to tie back into the themes of the characters. If the mega-series is about a war between humans and mutants, this war needs to loop directly back into some core value of Peter Parker, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, etc. Otherwise, these characters shouldn't even make an appearance.

Totally.

I think ideally, we'd have to have each of the main books set along five year plans as well, with each five year plan constituting a major story arc for each of the books, which then dovetails into the mega-event.

What confounds me is that, considering what a sequential and long-term medium comic book writing is, there are few writers who actually have a vision of the big picture.

Lots do have a vision of the big picture - generally though, either that picture isn't worth seeing, or it's improperly executed. Take your pick. This is hard stuff to do.
 

If we're going to be looking at the Ultimate Universe as being broken up into epochs, though, I'd say Grand Theft America is a better end to the first epoch than Ultimate Galactus. The recurring theme of the Ultimate Universe has been a superhuman arms war. Corporations and governments were fighting for control of superhuman weapons. The Ultimates were America's attempt at this. Spider-Man dealt with the overflow of superhumans. The X-Men served as forebearers of the forthcoming superhuman revolution. And the Fantastic Four provided a peek at the threats these superhumans will eventually be forced to rally against.

The other shoe dropped with Grand Theft America. The US and the world saw what a genuine threat the superhuman arms race is. The Ultimates moved in a new direction. The Clone Saga (clumsily) tied up a good deal of the drama between Peter and SHIELD. I think that should be the event that opens up the next chapter of the UU.

Bass said:
Lots do have a vision of the big picture - generally though, either that picture isn't worth seeing, or it's improperly executed. Take your pick. This is hard stuff to do.

True. It is hard. Fiction is always mutating, and it's easy to let a novel twist and turn in your head and then polish up the old drafts before publication, but unless you've got the whole series in the can, it's a lot harder to curb these changes in a comic book.

Edit: The conflict going on before Grand Theft America was a Cold War. Now it's fire-hot. That should provide the UU with a lot of fresh new potential. Too bad it won't.
 
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Awesome idea. JonnyFreeze already has some shares, if everyone in UC did so as well and we all voted together. . . ka-ching!

I was talking more along the lines of a bloody coup, with myself installed as Comic Book Pope.
 
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