I actually thought this was okay, considering.
I should say first of all that I like Ultimate Spiderman. Pretty much all of it. I don't think there's been a bad issue. It may never have been GREAT great, but it was always pretty good, in my opinion. Which I realise puts me in a minority, here.
If this was really the ending which it had all been building to, then I would be pretty annoyed and disappointed. But it patently isn't. Bendis is going to pretty much carry on where he left off when vol 2 starts later this year- though whether I'm going to be reading it is another matter entirely.
And though we may not be seeing Ultimate Peter Parker for a while, he is so not dead. He was caught in a magical explosion. He disappears. There's no body. Just a tattered mask. It would be lame to have killed the character with a magical thingy unrelated to anything he's been through in the past- but the reason it was magical is so that he can be not dead. He's off in some magicky limbo place for a while.
I don't think Bendis wanted to end it that way. It seems like he still had Peter Parker stories he wanted to tell, maintaining the whole High School status quo. But then suddenly everything is forced into a new direction.
It was an editorial decision to cancel the entire ultimate line. Which had to include Spidey, even though they're relaunching it straight away, because USM was the one Ult title that worked, and sold too. So Bendis' hands were tied to the extent that he had to write a final issue and he had to tie in to ultimatum. Maybe he was told that Peter should seemingly die, or maybe that was his decision. Whatever.
So given those pretty crappy parameters, I thought he did it pretty well. It's not meant to resolve or tie anything up- it gets Peter out of the picture for a while, and the whole Loeb Ultimatum mess can go on without him, which could be for the best; maybe Bendis has actually rescued his character from Loeb's massacre, to bring him back in when the dust settles. Maybe. USM's Ultimatum issues have been head and shoulders above the dreck in all the other tie-ins. DD may have died off panel, but the scenes where they found his body had real dignity and pathos.
I thought the silent issue worked. You didn't need words, you just had to work a little harder. It was effective. Ironic how people criticise Bendis for his annoying dialogue, than criticise him further for doing a no-speaking issue...
I thought the £3.99 price tag was pretty cynical yes, but I didn't even notice it was gonna cost me more till I got to the cash desk.
Having said all that, that's it for me I suspect. It really doesn't matter if Bendis and Millar bounce back with some good stories; unless they are really damn good, it's broken. The end of the Ultimate Universe mark 1 after ten years seems a pretty good jumping off point. Did Marvel not think this through? The whole thing has turned to crap, but a lot of people are still buying the books out of loyalty. So lets cancel the books and start again from issue 1. Same crap, no loyalty. Oh, and lets charge them an extra buck, too. That guy at newsarama was pretty spot on.
Bye bye ult spidey. You deserved better than this.
