The Good
David Nakayama's cover is beautiful. It's completely stunning and has such a cool presence to it.
The design for the character, whom we're assuming is Scourge, is pretty dang cool. It's a pretty simple white trenchcoat and white skull head, However, it really works and looks incredibly cool. This is the one thing about this book that will attract readers and pique their interest. This book still has a ton of potential to work.
The Bad
The best way to describe ALL-NEW ULTIMATES is "frustrating." Most of the time, the reader is going to have to play a guessing game to figure out what's going on and which characters are which. This is the biggest problem with the book. Problems seems to magically solve themselves off panel, while the story chaotically jumps between Spider-Man and the rest of the team as they all try to figure out the mystery of the drugs.
The story, from what you can piece together, feels like a story readers have seen quite a few times recently, except this is not as coherent. Aside from that, the dialogue is bland and any character could be put next to those word balloons and for the most part, it wouldn't make a difference. A few times, characters speak with these cringe-worthy one-liners and most of the time, it doesn't even feel like the character should be saying it. Characters in their late teens are using slang from 20 years ago, and Spider-man comes off as a bit of a Bombshell stalker.
You can't have a good, overall book without some good art and that's another place this issue really drops the ball. The characters look the same. There's so many characters with long faces and the reader will have to decide who is who based on their haircut or haircolor. Character's faces do not remain consistent either. Their eyes bug-out and it looks silly.
The Verdict
ALL-NEW ULTIMATES is the biggest disappointment of the post-Cataclysm era. Both the story and the art are a flop, and while a street-level super-hero team, in the Ultimate Universe, is a fantastic idea, it falls so flat here and miss its mark by a long shot. While the cover is really cool looking and the new vigilante character looks cool, everything else about this issue is a pass.
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