Broken Frontier

Brian Michael Bendis, arguably most famous for helping create the Ultimate Marvel Universe nearly ten years ago, shakes things up a bit in this new Ultimate  mini-series. Broken up into three distinct parts, all four issues each, we are now beginning this twelve-issue story’s second act.

Picking up directly after Ultimate Enemy, characters are still trying to piece together events that have just recently occurred. These are events that connect the Roxxon corporation (responsible for cloning Peter Parker, amongst other things), the Baxter Building, and surgical strikes on specific superheroes. Some made it out alive, others did not.

Bendis starts the story at Project Pegasus with the arrival of Dr. Philip Lawson. He’s a strange, emotionally stilted and glib man. He’s also an alien, dubbed Captain Marvel by Nick Fury, assigned to protect the base and all its contents. The scenes between him and the base's Project Commander, Wendall Vaughn (that's a fun Easter egg for Marvel fans) are fun and swift. It's the best kind of inappropriate conversation. They're never on the same page and Captain Marvel's ignorance of human behavior is constantly humorous.

The rest of the story involves Spider-Man, his lady clone, Ben Grimm's new transformation, and many more happenings involving the Ultimate characters. The story mainly deals with the messy business of recap and set up for this chapter in the larger story. The pros of a maxi-series like this are the long form story and (hopefully) fulfilling climax. A major con, however, would be the inordinate amount of set up during certain stages of the tale. Due to its nature, being three separate pieces playing into the major whole, the pacing and structure is a little jarring. What feels like it should be reading as a fifth issue, actually plays like a first issue, but still continues directly from the previous story. It's a little overwhelming, but Bendis ties it up nicely and brings us full circle by issue's end with the appearance of one of his latest additions to the Ultimate U. There are even larger plot developments that pull from Ultimate Origins, which Bendis also wrote.

There is definitely a larger landscape at play here. A landscape beautifully captured by artist Rafa Sandoval (Ultimate Enemy). His style blends wonderfully with Bendis' storytelling and actually feels like the same universe in which Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen played. The fluidity of panels captures Spider-Man wonderfully and he really nails the awesome power of Captain Marvel. I for one cannot wait for him to tackle whatever battle of epic proportions this series is heading towards.

All in all, this is a great little book, but unfortunately relies too heavily on the previous tale to be a new number one. It’s the exact same creative team, continuing the same story. Readers that pick this up as a new number one, without having read Ultimate Enemy, may find themselves a little lost. Despite all that, I’m suitably intrigued, waiting for this mystery to ultimately unfold.