Archie comics goes to the dark side, and the writing and art is flawless.

Remender's take on a joining of Avengers and X-Men gives me a headache. It's a decent enough premise, and in other hands, it could even have been a fun one. But from issue one, we get nothing but HUGE PLOT and HUGE TWISTS and it becomes very old, very quickly. Cassaday's art feels very one-note as well, and while I enjoyed his stuff on Amazing X-Men, I don't enjoy it here. Meh. I might catch up with the story later on, but I dropped this series pretty quickly in favor of the much better Avengers and X-Men books.

Note: I only read the main story and the Ultimate Spider-Man tie-in.

The Ultimate universe's track record for huge events continues to suck.

A majority of the action that takes place in this book is simply explosion after explosion, with no emotional resonance at all. The action takes up so much page space that when the final battle does happen in the last issue, it moves too quickly, with no pauses to take in the enormity of what is happening. Unfortunately, that means the sacrifices made have no resonance whatsoever.

Spoiler

Why should I care that Thor is stuck in the negative zone? Kitty Pryde got saved, woohoo? I completely missed Captain America's death in the messy art, and was confused as to why Storm was holding his shield at the end.

So, you know, it's Ultimatum all over again, but at least the Ultimate Spider-Man tie-in for this was much, much better.

Marvel needs to realize that Miles Morales and the Ultimate Teens are the only good thing going in this universe and drop everything else.