The Ultimate Barrage
Our resident head honcho brought you news of the upcoming Ultimate Origins event Marvel has planned to coincide with the Ultimatum series that promises to alter the Ultimate line for the foreseeable future.
Some would say the whole line is pointless now. The line was originally conceived as a way to attract new readers to the industry. Since the books were starting from scratch, they would not have a backlog of continuity for these new readers to keep track of. The problem is that as we near the decade mark on the Ultimate Universe, it now has its own continuity. Ultimate Spider-man especially has a great deal of story invested in itself and while it tends to do an excellent job in using this history well, it somewhat defeats the purpose of the line.
So Marvel has a few options on its hands. They can continue things as normal and lose more readers as the Ultimate books slip lower down the sales charts. They can cancel the whole line outright, which seems unlikely given that they do still sell (for now), especially Ultimate Spider-Man. Trim the fat by canceling a book or two (Ultimate Fantastic Four, I'm looking at you) and continuing the line in a series of limited series such as Ultimate Iron Man.
Most likely though, Marvel will use Ultimate Origins and Ultimatum to reshift the focus of the books into a tighter, more cohesive universe. The books have been mostly stand-alone with only some crossover up to this point. Given that these two series focus on several Ultimate books, this is a definite possibility.
So all that meandering was to eventually say that Major Spoilers has three of the four covers for Ultimate Origins #1. There is a 50/50 split for the Simone Bianchi and Gabrielle Dell'Otto covers with two variants provided by Michael Turner (one a sketch variant). Check out the gallery below to see more Wolverine than you can shake a stick at.
