1 – “How do you stand the disappointment?”
Let’s just jump to the end. The dome over The City has opened and our foursome of ostensible heroes (Iron Lad, Doom, America Chavez, and Spider-Man) have entered, or, rather, been sucked inside a new time bubble that contains The City anew immediately after the dome falls. Inside, The City looks like shit. A complete post-industrial nightmare of pollution. The Children attack, they’re unbeatable, until the foursome is saved by Death’s Head 22 and a cadre of Deathloks, and, then, taken back to Immortus, who is presumably Howard Stark, but may also be the evolution of Kang, who was either Howard or Tony Stark, where they’re told that finding the Maker in The City isn’t a problem, because the Maker is The City, cut to:
The central node of the City, a sickly giant tree in the centre, with the Maker’s face as the trunk.
The evolution of The City and the Maker is to become Krakoa.
If Ultimate Invasion set up the path of this Ultimate Universe under the influence of Warren Ellis, specifically Planetary, then Ultimate Endgame ends it under the influence of Jonathan Hickman. What springs to mind, specifically, is the way that this issue uses Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1 as something of a template to reference and respond to. That issue, which began an aborted run by Hickman and Esad Ribić was a genuinely exciting issue to read upon release. It felt fresh and new, and gave off the impression of everything falling apart at once.
Camp uses that idea of various locations where things fall apart in an interesting way. While the Hickman/Ribić issue centres around Nick Fury and SHIELD monitoring all of these situations, including Tony Stark getting taken out, a conflict with Asgard, the appearance of/engagement with The City, and ends with Fury staring into space, eyes wide, declaring that he doesn’t know what to do, the Camp issue approaches the chaos initially as a positive. The world is falling apart in revolution. The chaos is the unmaking of the status quo and, instead of being on the side of Fury and that status quo, we’re rooting for the downfall. It’s a clever reversal that gives the issue a different sort of tension. A hopeful one where it’s building to the moment when the dome falls and The City re-engages with the world.
In that tension is the fear that everything will go south immediately. That all hope will be lost. And that’s what happens. Everything falls apart in a similar fashion to how things go in Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1: where The City sucked in members of Fury’s team there, it sucks in our foursome here. Where death and destruction rains down on Fury’s forces there, it’s Fury that emerges from nowhere to rain down death and destruction on the Ultimates.
The prologue in Ultimate Endgame #1 where the Maker’s destruction of the Eternals is shown even relates to the opening of Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1, which shows the Maker and his batch of Children finding the spot to build The City. Before building his City in this universe, the Maker destroys and replaces another... Olympia is, after all, something of an earlier version of the Maker’s City. An eternal city populated with its superpowered children that are continually replenished upon death. Except, where Olympia is eternal stasis, The City is meant to be eternal evolution. And the Maker becoming The City (and shown as a tree in its centre) is a clear reference to Krakoa, it’s also the Maker becoming the Machine at the heart of Olympia. The Maker has now become what he destroyed and is he now facing a new version of himself...?
One of the key visual similarities that I found interesting is the way that the Children look identical in both comics. When The City reveals itself in both comics, the Children are the same bald beings with the same mechanical attachment, the same uniforms. Camp and artist Jonas Scharf could have gone in any direction with the Children. After all, the Children in Ultimate Invasion didn’t look exactly this way. Instead, they chose the visual callback of that initial encounter with The City and its Children in Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1 where the Children were similarly overwhelming to Captain Britain and his team after they’re sucked into The City.
The biggest difference is that, while I appreciate Ultimate Endgame #1 upon reflection, the experience of reading it was almost the opposite of what it was like to read Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1 when it came out. While Ultimate Comics Ultimates #1 was the beginning of something, Ultimate Endgame #1 is the ending, the one that we’ve been waiting for and anticipating for two years... and what can live up to those hopes? The experience of reading Ultimate Endgame #1 somewhat mirrors the events of it. The anticipation, the waiting, the countdown to the moment... and, then, it doesn’t go how you thought it would. Is that good? Is that bad? It’s an experience, I’d argue and one that I’m appreciating more and more...
