Ultimate Invasion #1 - Marvel Comics

ULTIMATE INVASION No. 1, August 2023

Apparently penned “in the bold tradition of the Ultimate Comics line,” Jonathan Hickman’s “new vision of the Marvel Universe” certainly should have caught the imagination of its readers with its pulse-pounding opening and the sensational gunplay which it entails. In fact, the four-person team’s outrageously upfront attempt to simply walk into the heavily fortified Damage Control Remote Prison 42 and brazenly wipe out its hapless inhabitants is wonderfully written, especially as the South Carolina-born author uses mercenary replacement Jackson to ask all the questions which are doubtless occurring to the audience as the murderous action ensues.

Perhaps somewhat disappointingly however, this enthralling narrative slows down quite considerably once Dominic Green, Mischa Slope and Randall West remove their masks at the behest of their one-billion-dollar prize. The Maker has always arguably been a bit of a dialogue-driven super-villain, even before the terrorist’s Earth-1610 was destroyed when the Multiverse perished. Yet in this oversized forty-page-periodical, the “Human Mutate altered by the N-Zone” simply doesn’t stop waxing lyrical about his grand scheme, even towards the end of the book when he faces the combined might of the Illuminati; “How can you stop me when you know neither where I’m going nor what I’m going to do.?”

Frustratingly, the 'real' Reed Richards isn’t shy of ratcheting up the word count either, most notably when he briefs the rest of the planet’s disconcertingly impotent “covert think-tank” as to what his devious interdimensional duplicate has been up to since escaping custody. The Fantastic Four founder’s summary of the criminal’s various thefts from Wakanda, New Arctilan, the Sanctum Sanctorum and the ruins of Atlantis is probably this publication’s biggest missed opportunity as Hickman simply has Mister Fantastic gloss over these cataclysmic events with a few well-populated text balloons, rather than providing the book’s bibliophiles with some much needed frantic fighting and high-octane battle sequences.

Ultimately therefore, the success of this comic rests upon the shoulders of Bryan Hitch, whose layouts, especially during the aforementioned jail break, are top notch. Indeed, perhaps the biggest motivation for purchasing this publication lies in its behind-the-scenes article featuring the British artist’s raw pencils, which provide a terrific insight into just how much detail the illustrator crams into each and every one of his prodigious panels.

Writer: Jonathan Hickman, Penciler: Bryan Hitch, and Inker: Andrew Currie