This week Luke and Devin are back as Punisher and Daredevil face down, with a guest appearance by Spider-Man, and then the Sentinels are hunting down mutants and it is up to the X-men to stop them and Magneto and Hank is leaving big poops everywhere.
Issues Covered:
- Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #6-8
- Ultimate X-men Vol 1 #1-6 + 1/2
Check out the show notes and images after the jump!
Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #6-8
Writer – Brian Michael Bendis, Art – Bill Sienkievicz, JC – colors, Richard Starkings/Comicraft/Wes Abbott – letters
On Ryker’s Island as conversation about Herman Shultz aka the Shocker being released because Spider-Man captured him, thereby interfering with the law, leading to others caught by heroes like Daredevil looking to have similar cases overturned, Frank Castle makes a shank and attacks because the criminals were discussing the revenge they planned to take.
The guards somewhat reluctantly come in and stop him and he’s returned to solitary where Doctor Ruben, his psychologist, comes to visit him and is shocked because he’s being restrained like Hannibal Lecter.
We find out he’s killed nine before and the warden is struggling to figure out what to do.
Frank is in for killing police and we also find out that his family got murdered in the park, but he doesn’t share this. He used to be a police officer, murdered two other officers after his family was killed and NOBODY KNOWS WHY? Ruben leaves Frank in with a pen, a paperclip and a coffee cup.
Meanwhile Spider-man is frustrated with people selling photos of him online to the point that he misses that Frank Castle, also known as the Punisher, has escaped.
A drunk cop gets kicked out of a bar and ends up running into the Punisher who shoots him in the face.
We cut to Matt Murdock, now older, an actual lawyer, and talking to Detective Bruce Greenwood who wants to talk but Bruce gets distracted by Spider-Man who Daredevil apparently hates?
Bruce goes on to explain that the entire force was corrupt because The Owl and others were paying cops to look the other way. Frank really hated it, get Internal Affairs involved, so Artie Jillette who worked as the go between “suggested” killing Frank before he said anything. Bruce tried to warn him but Frank told everything and told Bruce to do the same for honor. Jillette ended up trying to have Frank killed but killed his family instead. Frank knew Jillette had cops involved, so Matt tries to tell Bruce to turn himself in but it is too late and the Punisher kills him so Matt switches into Daredevil to go talk to the Punisher and ends up with a gun against his head.
Daredevil being a nerd tells him to put his faith in the system and Frank doesn’t want to and they have to move when Frank shoots at him and vanishes and Matt has to return to the office to talk to the police about the murder.
Jillette comes in and sees this and knows that he’s next so he goes home, threatens his kids because he’s drunk and then the Punisher comes and takes him to the docks. Daredevil intervenes, and then Spider-Man comes in kicking Punisher and letting Jillette run free. They both yell at him, and Daredevil has Spider-Man catch the Punisher and present the gun he killed Bruce with and the Punisher to the police.
Time passes, the discussion of the Frank Castle Bill comes up restricting vigilantes, Matt fights to keep Punisher out of solitary and Punisher gets into his new cell where it turns out his roommate is Jillette, which seriously Warden, how are you this bad???
Ultimate X-men Vol 1 #1-6
Writer – Mark Millar, Pencils – Adam Kubert, Inks – Adam Thibert, Danny Miki, Joe Weems, Colors – Richard Isanove, Avalon Studios, Letters – Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Wes Abbott
There are already Sentinels, which are giant purple and pink 20 foot tall murder robots that go and hunt down mutants which isn’t great. They were apparently sent to kill terrorist mutants but it doesn’t seem like it and the government is in support of it as a response to the Brotherhood of Mutants attacking Capitol Hill, as led by Magneto – and HOLD ON A MINUTE.
Magneto and mutants killed government leaders in Washington DC and no other comic deals with this? Why aren’t the Avenger assembled for this? Isn’t this supposed to be a connected universe? Damn it Mark!
Anyway Bolivar Trask plans to get the other mutants in the country in 6 to 8 weeks and all the while Hank McCoy who is a beefy boy with big feet is watching this on TV in a bar in San Diego. An angry bar man tries to attack him suspecting him to be a mutant. He stops him, is threatened by the bartender and so he leaves after telling the bartender he left a giant shit in the toilet and didn’t flush. That’s when Jean Grey, a redhead appears to offer him work. Jean then heads to Athens, Texas and uses mind powers to break Ororo Munroe from the prison because she was caught stealing cars and she has weather powers. Ororo mentions Magneto tried to offer her work but she doesn’t want to enslave the human race which Jean is fine with.
And in New York City, Piotr Rasputin is meeting for an arms deal to sell a suitcase nuke. They try to double cross him by shooting him with a gatling gun but he turns to metal and as he walks from the wreckage, Jean shows up to talk to him too.
They’re all about back to the Xavier Institute for Gifted Children where Scott Summers, aka Cyclops gives them their costumes and codenames – Beast, Storm, Colossus and along with Marvel Girl they go to talk to the professor. They all wear black latex now which apparently hides the mutant gene but there is a lot of variance apparently in how much you need to wear since Jean is essentially wearing a sports bra and pants with major cutouts in the legs and that is enough.
And then we meet the worst version of Charles Fucking Xavier, bald, wheelchair bound telepath ever, who instead of having a library just randomly goes into the brains of writers to get story ideas. Dude. Dude. Dude.
He goes on to explain how he previously helped Magneto make a mutant base in the Savage Land until Magneto turned traitorous and crippled him with a metal pole through Charles back.
Now to fight Magneto he uses his computer Cerebro to find mutants and has a new target – a 15 year old boy named Bobby Drake who ran from home to protect his parents from the Sentinels.
The X-men go to Times Square, rescue Bobby from Sentinels as they learn to work together. Storm’s powers knock her out after she uses them once, Beast gets two of them to attack each other, Colossus destroys one with an Old Navy truck he tosses but Colossus gets hurt in the blast. The last Sentinel grabs Cyclops who reveals he can control his optic blasts with his gloves as well and Bobby freezes the last one. But then the crowd gets angry so they all leave and in the Savage Land, Magneto meets with the arms deals who Colossus fought before and since they didn’t get the nuke he wanted, he uses his magnetic control to rip the pacemaker out of one of them. He plans to send an infiltrator to murder Charles Xavier – an infiltrator with blades in his hands known as Wolverine – last seen in that Marvel Team-Up. Though it is not clear if this was before or after that. Comics!
Wolverine lands in JFK, meets with a contact and both of them are gunned down by the military?
Beast and Jean meanwhile are flying around in the Blackbird jet and we get the first mention of how Jean is nineteen years old. Also she likes invading people’s thoughts as well.
Xavier ends up ordering the X-men to go and get Wolverine who was apparently part of a black ops mutant program run by the Pentagon who escaped about a year and a half ago and who has just now been captured.
Wolverine wakes up and finds one of his old Weapon X cohorts who goes by Wraith who has him trapped in an adamantium cage so he can’t escape and they can shoot him as much as they want.
The X-men knock over the convoy and free Wolverine who rides off on a motorcycle and sends the jeep with Wraith in it off the road. Wolverine is stopped from murdering him and unknown to them, this was all part of Magneto’s plan to get the X-men to trust Wolverine.
Time passes and Wolverine takes to training in the simulation danger room where he is murdering his teammates. The Beast also mentions he has a computer program so you can have sex with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera who would have been around 18-19 years old which is disturbing but also I guess if Beast is a teen is a bit less bad but still disturbing.
Wolverine meanwhile is also able to shield his thoughts for a reason.
Iceman interrupts everyone because the Brotherhood of Mutants has captured one of George Bush’s daughters in retaliation for the Sentinel killings. Xavier doesn’t want them to have this false ceasefire so they head to Croatia with misgivings, while the president’s daughter is being watched by Toad who is a frog man, Quicksilver who is superfast and Magneto’s son, Magneto’s daughter with magic powers, the Scarlet Witch, Blob who is a big boy and Mastermind who looks like a silver haired Steven Segal.
The X-men bust in and save the daughter, get into a fight, Quicksilver runs into Wolverine 1 on 1 and is confused and Wolverine ends up driving off with the daughter and drives off a cliff and into the dock of the Blackbird, saving her. Unfortunately as they celebrate, Beast got caught under the rubble and might be dead.
Things get worse as local Croatioans start attacking pinning the other X-men down and things get worse when Magneto shows up and saves them and lets them go, expecting Wolverine to still kill the Professor after he’s had sex with Jean.
The team is able to save Beast but have to use some biotech that turned some apes blue. Jean and Wolverine talk about how the president is likely to suspend the Sentinels program and how she has issues trusting him and then they make out and Scott sees and dude. She’s like 19 and your age is still undetermined.
Anyway Condoleezza Rice let’s Professor X know about the Sentinel shutdown when Scott comes in because he plans to leave because he is right in that Xavier is doing too little so Professor X psychically drugs him which makes him angrier so he leaves to go to Magneto in the Savage Land.
And then Beast wakes up with Blue hair.
The Brotherhood with Cyclops in it bombs the Parliament building and he’s angry that they didn’t give the full warning he planned on, but they were attacking because Tony Blair planned to make Sentinels and they leave with Cyclops angry and Scarlet Witch trying to soothe him.
In DC Jean tries to reach Cyclops after a night with Wolverine but is unable to, and then they all meet with the President, who doesn’t plan to attack the US mutant population but does plan to send Sentinels to attack the Savage Land which they just found by tracking Cyclops in the Blackbird.
Cyclops and Magneto meet then because Cyclops is having doubts and Magneto talks about a lot of reasonably bad shit humanity has done like the Holocaust and Cyclops doesn’t want to kill and Magneto is like Fine and please come listen to Scarlet Witch doing Poetry in the language I made up and also she wants to fuck you and also call me Father in front of my actual son because I got all sorts of weird fetishes.
Meanwhile Pietro and Scarlet Witch talk about how Magneto loves them but also hates them for reminding them of how he had sex with a human woman but then the Sentinels attack, kill a lot of people and Magneto ends up using his magnetic powers to rewrite them to hunt humans in America and so Cyclops calls in the X-men.
Jean finds out that Wolverine came to kill the Professor and she is angry and Wolverine tries to say he’s been changed.
The X-men fight to hold off the Sentinels and Magneto steals the president but Xavier confronts him. Magneto immediately destroys his chair and points guns and cameras at Charles, missing that Wolverine sneaks up behind him and guts him. In his dying gasp Magneto sets off every nuclear missile to explode so Quicksilver, who Cyclops convinced to go ahead, steals Magneto’s helmet, allowing Charles to capture his mind, make Magneto into a super magnet attracting the sentinels and all of the other metal, turns off Magneto’s brain and he explodes in the atmosphere with all of the nukes presumably stopped.
Cyclops returns now with a bad soul patch to rejoin the X-men and Charles gloats that this was the first step of his plan for mutants.
Ultimate X-men 1/2
Writer – Geoff Johns, Pencils – Aaron Lopresti, Inks – Danny Miki, Color – Hi-Fi Design, Letters – ComicCraft
The X-men find Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver attacking a military caravan and get in a fight with them and it turns out Quicksilver thinks that they have Magneto’s body but in reality they only have his helmet. Cyclops tries to talk them to join with him but Quicksilver refuses to work with humans so Scarlet Witch kisses Cyclops and they leave. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver end up parting ways after Quicksilver confesses to loving his sister and so he’s just left with his father’s helmet.