Wednesday is Comic Day!

Writer: Jeph Loeb Artist: David Finch Publisher: Marvel Price: $3.99

With no doubt in my mind - there is no worse writer, in comic books, today, than Jeph Loeb. It feels strange to say that because he has done some good stuff. When he sticks to small, personal, character stories like Daredevil: Yellow or Spider-man: Blue he produces good work. When he tries to be "cool" and produce a big action popcorn kind of story he fails... EVERY TIME. Ultimatum is yet another example of this. It is a truly wretched story. The only story that I can remember reading that was more wretched was the Jeph Loeb run on Ultimates that led into this mini-series.

Besides producing dialog that is painful to the ear, besides the continual need to go for shock value, Loeb clearly has no understanding of these characters, at all. He's writing each character not as they are in Marvel's Ultimate Universe but as he remembers them to be in the regular Marvel universe.

Loeb, through Ultimatum, is literally destroying the Ultimate Universe. The series is page after page of important character brutally killed for little apparent reason. What is most depressing is that this fecal matter is contaminating Ultimate Spider-man, which has consistently been one of Marvel's best books, since it started the Ultimate Universe, nine years ago.