3 out of 5

I know is he CRAZY giving some Malibu Ultraverse crossover mini series an average rating because certainly it was crapper bunk like most crossover stuff WELL GUESS WHAT WILL BE EVEN MORE SURPRISING BESIDES THIS UBER RUN-ON SENTENCE IS that issue one was actually a lot of fun and I stopped using caps.

So the Ultraverse was one of those all-titles interconnected universe deals that happened in the 90s and I wasn’t reading comics then, so when Crossgen came out I sorta’ thought the idea was novel.  The Malibu books I’ve picked up have been because of Gerber’s involvement, but he’s only peripheral here, as are the other Malibu writers, just contributing, I suppose, the where and how of their characters involved in BREAK-THRU while Jones scripts the whole thing.  In typical mass-title crossover fashion, issues one and two of this mini are bookends to the “story” running through other titles, and in typical crossover fashion, you can just read the bookends to give you the gist.  If you care.  Which: I didn’t  The story isn’t really what’s of value here – whoops – which is what brought the rating down from four to three as we go from issue one to two, ’cause issue one is insane lead-up and issue two is mostly… LET’S FILL IN THE STORY BLANKS.  And wouldn’t ya’ know, it boils down to multi-universe shit, which is what every goddamn universe changing crossover storyline has seemed to have been about.  Oooh.  So once #2 starts tossing those plotty nuggets into the mix.. meh.  Thankfully it retained enough of its ridiculous footnote insanity (see issue #… see issue #) to keep the WTF readability high.

How is that different from other crossovers?  I’m not sure.  I guess, even by the time of 80s Crisis, Superman and Batman had gotten so ingrained in the comic world that we can take them more seriously than we should, so the scripts for those crossovers are full of soap-opera dialogue that makes you sort of embarrassed to turn the page.  Malibu certainly doesn’t sidestep soap – the majority of these two issues are pointless superhero (or ‘Ultras’ in the Malibu world) arguments about who should get to the moon first to discover the source of some threatening catastrophe that also contains the secrets to all their origins omg – and all of the characters have so easily adopted fun hero names with nifty logos for their books like ‘Prototype’ and ‘Hardware’… but there’s just something cheeky about it.  It’s taking itself seriously, but with awareness of what’s come before.  So, yes, crossover title to grab your dollars, but the plotting doesn’t try to really fool you into thinking this matters outside of these pages.  It’s very insular, and thus more tolerable, and more fun.  There’re SO MANY characters that we aren’t expected to just automatically know, so the buildup is packed and packed with little one panel reminders of ‘X character was interacting with Y to get here’ and it’s just kinda’ ADD spectacular silly.  And with George Perez on art you know you’re getting energetic, professionally planned panels with just the right amount of fore and background detail.

So run out and grab it from the dollar bin?  Well, no.  I mean, I think unless you’re doing a writer collection like me this won’t have much value, but I think it would have been fun had I been collecting the Ultraverse at the time, and a satisfying enough read that I wouldn’t have minded dropping dollars on it, unlike every universe-shattering event that Marvel and DC concoct twice or three times a year.