Ultimate FF #1
This issue is mostly a setup issue, and Ultimate Doom only appears at the end, so it's a bit difficult to form an opinion on it at this stage.
But First, A Brief History of Ultimate Doom
Apparently, they were initially going for a more 'realistic' take on Doom in the Ultimateverse, so his name was changed to "Victor Van Damme" and his backstory is frankly a lot more boring and generic; instead of being raised by loving Gypsy parents killed under an oppressive regime, he was raised by a cold, abusive aristocratic father who was allegedly descended from Vlad Tepes Dracula. (Most annoyingly, despite the fact that Doom's mother is by far the most important of his two parents to his 616 backstory, in Ultimateverse she is completely absent from his story and never once mentioned. Yay, updating for the 21st century!)
On the other hand, his history with the F4 is a bit more interesting in this universe. In the UU, Reed and Victor are both students at the Baxter Building, an academy for genius kids run by Franklin Storm, Sue and Johnny's father. (Sue is a genius biologist in this universe; Johnny is basically just a student there because of his dad.) Reed is at the school from age 11 until he's 21, and Victor is there for a similar length of time. Victor keeps to himself among the students and for the first four years he barely says a word to Reed until one day, in an interesting reversal of 616 canon, he marches into Reed's room to correct a mistake in his equations.
Reed is initially pissed, but realises Victor is right, and proposes that the two of them help each other out with their projects. From then on they are, if not outright friends, then definitely study buddies, and work together for the next five plus years.
In this universe, Victor is also caught up in the accident that gives the F4 their powers. Reed is trying to open a portal to the negative zone, and invites the Storms and his childhood friend Ben Grimm to witness the test. However, Victor is convinced that the numbers are wrong and it's going to end in disaster.
It's never actually proven who's right in this universe: Reed believes Victor sabotaged his test; Victor believes Reed was the one who screwed up and he was just trying to fix things. Either way, it of course goes Horribly Wrong, and the F4 get their 616 universe powers - but this time Victor gets powers too. His body turns to steel, with a goat-legged look; he can fire needles from his arms and breathe poison, and no longer has a sense of pain. Naturally, he's not particularly happy about this, and becomes an enemy of the F4.
After a few minor clashes, Doom plants a magical parasite in Johnny Storm to force Reed to ask him for help, and makes Reed agree to a body swap as his price for fixing it. But the parasite turns out to be too dangerous to contain, and after Victor evicts it, it latches onto Reed-in-Doom's-body as the most powerful host around. There's also an incursion from a portal to the Zombieverse going on at this time (Reed's fault) so Reed plans to sacrifice himself by entering the portal and sealing it from the inside. However, Victor swaps their bodies back so he can be the one to make a heroic sacrifice instead, and walks into the Zombieverse portal, never to be seen again.
...Except he does actually show up again, as the master manipulator behind the Ultimatum storyline, at the end of which he's apparently killed by Ben Grimm. However, since Ultimatum is a crappy, crappy incoherent deathfest that A, fails to explain how Doom even got back, and B, Did Not Do The Research, resulting in a death scene with Ben crushing Doom's head that would only work if he was a man in armour rather than solid metal like he is in the UU, it's a popular theory that this Doom was an impostor, and the real Doom was still in the Zombieverse the whole time.
Whether this new series is running with that explanation for how he can be back, we will see...
Ultimate FF #1
So, anyway, Ultimate FF. I haven't really read much Ultimateverse stuff since Ultimatum, so all I'm really vaguely aware of is that Ultimate Reed went evil, and there was some sort of event called Cataclysm recently. This story opens with some construction workers in 'New Jersey, site of Galactus event', whatever that was. They pick up some weird seismic readings, something erupts through the ground, and then we cut to our heroes arriving a short while later.
Our heroes are apparently a team of geniuses: Sue Storm, Tony Stark and Sam Wilson/the Falcon, while supporting them up in the Helicarrier or some other floating base type thingie are Phil Coulson and Danny Ketch/Machine Man, who the captions tell me is a "deceased field agent/biomechanical hybrid of alien origin". (Also according to the captions, Sue is the head of the Future Foundation and Coulson is a Director, but I have no clue what the Future Foundation is in Ultimate Universe terms. Maybe a replacement for the Baxter school? I don't know. Presumably later issues will clue me in.)
Anyway, they go to investigate the anomaly, which has formed a dome trapping a dozen workers. They enter the dome, and find the workers have been mutated into monsters. Fighty time! They try to close the dimensional rift that's causing the anomaly, but can't do it. Tony and Sam are knocked unconscious; leaving Sue trying to hold off the monsters with a failing forcefield.
Meanwhile, the support team have no comms with the trio in the dome, and soon get edgy about it. They debate who they can send in after them: Machine Man says, "You got the smartest people on Earth to help you, and then, you have one of 'em in lockup, twiddling his weird-shaped thumbs. One who saved the damn world. Pull. Him. Out."
We're obviously being set up to think that it's Evil Reed Richards, and Sue clearly thinks so too when someone mysterious arrives to their rescue, collapsing the portal from within with a black hole. (Tony is sure he would totally have thought of that any minute.) She's convinced that "Reed" will kill the mutated workers rather than save them, and starts yelling at him not to hurt them, but instead the workers revert back and are left unharmed. She yells that it doesn't make them even and they don't need him, but of course, as we know, it's not actually Reed:
So, there you have it. Plot-wise, it's a little hard to rate, since this issue is all setup for a reveal that was already spoiled in the pre-publicity anyway. The dialogue's not bad, and gives a little bit of a sense of the field team's characters, though the supporting team are mostly just expositing this issue. Tony in particular definitely feels like Ult-verse Tony (complete with last 'dying' words: "I should have dated more supermodels.") and has a little bit of back and forth banter with Falcon, while Sue comes off as hardened and sharp after her experiences with Reed.
On the other hand, the art really does it no favours whatsoever. There are two pencillers credited, so I'm not sure if it's one on figures, one on backgrounds or what, but definitely the character art is super-scratchy and very uneven - some characters look decent in some panels, but the faces are very variable, and Sue in particular does not come off well most of the time. The colouring doesn't really help either: with the blue and purple uniforms it's all very murky and dull for much of the action.
So far I'm cautiously on board writing-wise and curious to see what they'll do with Doom, but wow, I hope they change artists fairly soon, because this artwork is just not working for me at all.
But First, A Brief History of Ultimate Doom
Apparently, they were initially going for a more 'realistic' take on Doom in the Ultimateverse, so his name was changed to "Victor Van Damme" and his backstory is frankly a lot more boring and generic; instead of being raised by loving Gypsy parents killed under an oppressive regime, he was raised by a cold, abusive aristocratic father who was allegedly descended from Vlad Tepes Dracula. (Most annoyingly, despite the fact that Doom's mother is by far the most important of his two parents to his 616 backstory, in Ultimateverse she is completely absent from his story and never once mentioned. Yay, updating for the 21st century!)
On the other hand, his history with the F4 is a bit more interesting in this universe. In the UU, Reed and Victor are both students at the Baxter Building, an academy for genius kids run by Franklin Storm, Sue and Johnny's father. (Sue is a genius biologist in this universe; Johnny is basically just a student there because of his dad.) Reed is at the school from age 11 until he's 21, and Victor is there for a similar length of time. Victor keeps to himself among the students and for the first four years he barely says a word to Reed until one day, in an interesting reversal of 616 canon, he marches into Reed's room to correct a mistake in his equations.
Reed is initially pissed, but realises Victor is right, and proposes that the two of them help each other out with their projects. From then on they are, if not outright friends, then definitely study buddies, and work together for the next five plus years.
In this universe, Victor is also caught up in the accident that gives the F4 their powers. Reed is trying to open a portal to the negative zone, and invites the Storms and his childhood friend Ben Grimm to witness the test. However, Victor is convinced that the numbers are wrong and it's going to end in disaster.
It's never actually proven who's right in this universe: Reed believes Victor sabotaged his test; Victor believes Reed was the one who screwed up and he was just trying to fix things. Either way, it of course goes Horribly Wrong, and the F4 get their 616 universe powers - but this time Victor gets powers too. His body turns to steel, with a goat-legged look; he can fire needles from his arms and breathe poison, and no longer has a sense of pain. Naturally, he's not particularly happy about this, and becomes an enemy of the F4.
After a few minor clashes, Doom plants a magical parasite in Johnny Storm to force Reed to ask him for help, and makes Reed agree to a body swap as his price for fixing it. But the parasite turns out to be too dangerous to contain, and after Victor evicts it, it latches onto Reed-in-Doom's-body as the most powerful host around. There's also an incursion from a portal to the Zombieverse going on at this time (Reed's fault) so Reed plans to sacrifice himself by entering the portal and sealing it from the inside. However, Victor swaps their bodies back so he can be the one to make a heroic sacrifice instead, and walks into the Zombieverse portal, never to be seen again.
...Except he does actually show up again, as the master manipulator behind the Ultimatum storyline, at the end of which he's apparently killed by Ben Grimm. However, since Ultimatum is a crappy, crappy incoherent deathfest that A, fails to explain how Doom even got back, and B, Did Not Do The Research, resulting in a death scene with Ben crushing Doom's head that would only work if he was a man in armour rather than solid metal like he is in the UU, it's a popular theory that this Doom was an impostor, and the real Doom was still in the Zombieverse the whole time.
Whether this new series is running with that explanation for how he can be back, we will see...
Ultimate FF #1
So, anyway, Ultimate FF. I haven't really read much Ultimateverse stuff since Ultimatum, so all I'm really vaguely aware of is that Ultimate Reed went evil, and there was some sort of event called Cataclysm recently. This story opens with some construction workers in 'New Jersey, site of Galactus event', whatever that was. They pick up some weird seismic readings, something erupts through the ground, and then we cut to our heroes arriving a short while later.
Our heroes are apparently a team of geniuses: Sue Storm, Tony Stark and Sam Wilson/the Falcon, while supporting them up in the Helicarrier or some other floating base type thingie are Phil Coulson and Danny Ketch/Machine Man, who the captions tell me is a "deceased field agent/biomechanical hybrid of alien origin". (Also according to the captions, Sue is the head of the Future Foundation and Coulson is a Director, but I have no clue what the Future Foundation is in Ultimate Universe terms. Maybe a replacement for the Baxter school? I don't know. Presumably later issues will clue me in.)
Anyway, they go to investigate the anomaly, which has formed a dome trapping a dozen workers. They enter the dome, and find the workers have been mutated into monsters. Fighty time! They try to close the dimensional rift that's causing the anomaly, but can't do it. Tony and Sam are knocked unconscious; leaving Sue trying to hold off the monsters with a failing forcefield.
Meanwhile, the support team have no comms with the trio in the dome, and soon get edgy about it. They debate who they can send in after them: Machine Man says, "You got the smartest people on Earth to help you, and then, you have one of 'em in lockup, twiddling his weird-shaped thumbs. One who saved the damn world. Pull. Him. Out."
We're obviously being set up to think that it's Evil Reed Richards, and Sue clearly thinks so too when someone mysterious arrives to their rescue, collapsing the portal from within with a black hole. (Tony is sure he would totally have thought of that any minute.) She's convinced that "Reed" will kill the mutated workers rather than save them, and starts yelling at him not to hurt them, but instead the workers revert back and are left unharmed. She yells that it doesn't make them even and they don't need him, but of course, as we know, it's not actually Reed:
So, there you have it. Plot-wise, it's a little hard to rate, since this issue is all setup for a reveal that was already spoiled in the pre-publicity anyway. The dialogue's not bad, and gives a little bit of a sense of the field team's characters, though the supporting team are mostly just expositing this issue. Tony in particular definitely feels like Ult-verse Tony (complete with last 'dying' words: "I should have dated more supermodels.") and has a little bit of back and forth banter with Falcon, while Sue comes off as hardened and sharp after her experiences with Reed.
On the other hand, the art really does it no favours whatsoever. There are two pencillers credited, so I'm not sure if it's one on figures, one on backgrounds or what, but definitely the character art is super-scratchy and very uneven - some characters look decent in some panels, but the faces are very variable, and Sue in particular does not come off well most of the time. The colouring doesn't really help either: with the blue and purple uniforms it's all very murky and dull for much of the action.
So far I'm cautiously on board writing-wise and curious to see what they'll do with Doom, but wow, I hope they change artists fairly soon, because this artwork is just not working for me at all.