Beautiful Disaster: Cataclysm: The Ultimates Last Stand #1 Review

Yesterday I complained that DC’s Forever Evil crossover wasn’t working for me because we’ve spent a whole bunch of weeks watching familiar villains in a new version of the universe run around unopposed, doing blatently evil shit for unclear reasons. And while it’s been all Earth-threateney and what-not, it hasn’t been all that compelling, because we all know that once the heroes reappear, there’s gonna be hell to pay. And to get that vaguely dissatisfied feeling has only taken a few months.

Enter Marvel’s Cataclysm, where a villain appears in a new universe and starts doing truly horrific things that endanger the planet without saying a word as to his motives. It’s Galactus, and unlike his prior appearances (and very much unlike Forever Evil), there is no herald and there are no grandiose declarations of superiority or inevitability. There is just hunger and mass destruction… and in one issue, it’s already ten times more compelling and tense than Forever Evil has been so far.

Miles Morales and his buddy Ganke are walking through Brooklyn when Galactus arrives. As often happens in Manhattan. This time around, Galactus isn’t in the mood to call us subcreatures or waste time painting some poor dupe silver or observe any of the other niceties: he just blows up a large part of New Jersey. As we wish would often happen in to New Jersey. Anyway, Mile suits up and heads toward the danger as Galactus performs unspeakable acts of urban renewal, and Miles tries to figure out just what the hell one teenager with spider powers can do against something like Galactus when The Ultimates arrive. As Miles takes point independently and works on saving the innocents, The Ultimates begin their attack on Galactus… to no discernible effect. As they try to regroup, Tony Stark recognizes Galactus’s energy signature as the same as he discovered coming from the 616 Universe at the end of last year’s Spider-Men, and Galactus starts building his world-consuming machine…

I don’t mean to make this review a compare and contrast with what’s been happening in Forever Evil, but even though Cataclysm is just starting, the differences are stark and interesting. Right out of the gate, we’ve got something more interesting than we have gotten in Forever Evil because there are actually superheroes here. We readers are told that the Crime Syndicate is formidable because they’re running around being antisocial with no one to oppose them, while in Cataclysm, we see the threat that Galactus presents by see Spider-Man scared shitless by him and Thor and The Thing being not only able to stop him, but pretty much unable to even get his attention. And that, combined with a solid amount of wholesale destruction, goes a hell of a long way toward demonstrating the stakes in a better, more concrete way than we see in Forever Evil.

Now, with that said, an argument could be made that the shit hits the fan a little bit quickly in this issue. It’s a 21-page first part, and all at once we get every standard response to a major threat that you would normally see in a large-scale superhero story about an extinction level event. It goes through them almost like a checklist: start with an overwhelmed mid-level hero, move to a military response that fails, before bringing in the big guns. And again, while this might seem like a plot outline for any number of major comic stories, that third step is where the bag guy is normally defeated. So while it might seem like there’s a certain amount of going through the expected motions going on here, I found that the effect added more tension than you’d expect. By getting all of the normal preliminaries – and the usual conclusion – out of the way with literally no effect, it makes it feel like the shit is really about to hit the fan. To me, it felt less rushed than it did an effective way to show just how dire the situation really is.

The characterizations,  however, were a little more hit or miss for me. I think writer Brian Michael Bendis nails Galactus simply by dint of having him not bother to say a word or generally pay all that much attention to the attacks against him while he gets down to business. It is a frankly more effective and intimidating characterization than the old school, “Behold, Humans!” utterances and heralds giving advance notice to we peons to make our peace with whatever gods we have going for us. However, at the same time we got some of the hoary old disaster movie dialogue chestnuts of, “I gotta joke in the face of disaster or I’ll start crying,” and “What can one man do?” that could have come straight from The Towering Inferno or any other old piece of disaster porn.

Mark Bagley has been one of my favorite cartoonists since the early issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, and there’s nothing here to change my opinion of that. And I use the word “cartoonist” because Bagley does just good old, straight ahead comic book art: it’s not hyper-realistic, it’s not heavily stylized (although you can recognize a Bagley-drawn face from a hundred yards away, even when that face is Galactus’s), it’s just good, clean comic art. The storytelling is pretty easy to follow  – even the two-page layouts that Bendis seems to demand lay out the panels to make it clear how to read the pages – although Bagley’s depiction of Iron Man’s heads-up display might confuse some new readers, and I caught a few panels where the places characters were looking had more of a tendency to misdirect the eye in a non-intuitive direction rather than across the page. But still: this is regular old comic book art, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Cataclysm is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it does what it sets out to do: it uses a variety of techniques to show us that the shit has well and truly hit the fan, and there aren’t going to be any simple solutions before a lot of people get killed… if there are any solutions at all. Let’s remember that Marvel has implied that Cataclysm might be the event that ends the Ultimate Universe for good. And yes, those added inside-baseball stakes give some built-in tension to the story, but it does a lot of things right to raise that sensation of foreboding on its own. It’s a pretty stark contrast to Forever Evil, where you just know everything’s gonna be all right once the heroes show up. In Cataclysm? The heroes are here already, and they’re still fucked. It’s good stuff.

If you need to pick one crossover issue or the other this week, go with Cataclysm. It’s pretty good stuff, and a damn solid kickoff.