YMMV / The Ultimates 3

• Audience-Alienating Era: The first two miniseries by Millar and Hitch were acclaimed by the public for its deconstruction of the superhero genre, the new takes on The Avengers and the cinematic style of the arts. The Avengers were a Cult Classic at the time, a semi-obscure comic under the shadow of Spider-Man and X-Men (the MCU had barely started that year), and the Ultimates turned them into the one of the hottest comics of the industry. Millar and Hitch were followed by this comic, with a subpar plot about robot duplicates, a murder mystery with a The Dog Was the Mastermind resolution, and art coming straight from the worst of the 1990s. The quality of the comic in itself was bad, but the freefall quality from one miniseries to the next made it worse.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Black Panther was actually Cap the whole time? It'd probably be a bit more shocking if it hadn't been so blatantly telegraphed from the outset.
• Designated Love Interest: Valkyrie appeared in The Ultimates 2, but just as a Loony Fan with no powers, cosplaying as a superhero, and she only met Henry Pym. Now she has powers and keeps flirting with Thor all the time.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Blob and Wasp fought against each other, and Blob said that he would eat her. It seemed like mere battle bravado at the moment, but Ultimatum showed him making good on his threat.
• Narm:
  • Just how bizarrely accepting everybody is of the Maximoff twins' incestuous relationship, acting as if it's the most perfectly normal thing in the world and treating Captain America as an old-fashioned bigot for being the only one to express any sort of confusion over it. Even the paparazzi don't seem to find anything unusual about it.
  • Thor's dialogue is written in very crappy Faux-Shakespearian English, which Valkyrie does an even poorer imitation of. This despite the fact that the previous volumes did not have them talking like this at all unlike their 616 counterparts.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: There's a reason why after Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum bombed, Mark Millar's return provided some relief to fans.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: This, along with Ultimatum, were written while Loeb was still suffering a Creator Breakdown caused by his son's death, with its subject matter, including the gore and incest, caused a lot of his other work including The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and Superman for All Seasons to be overlooked. While those works were beloved and he'd done better work following Ultimatum, he became known as the destroyer of Ultimate Marvel.
• Sequelitis: The Ultimates first two arcs, written by Mark Millar, were very well received, for its reinvention of The Avengers and its deconstruction of the superhero genre. Both stories neatly resolve all the subplots in them. But then Jeph Loeb wrote The Ultimates 3 with a sudden genre shift to the worst vices of The Dark Age of Comic Books, and the reception fell from a cliff.
• Strangled by the Red String: In 3, Thor and Valkyrie (who has suddenly joined the team out of nowhere) are in a relationship. No build-up, nothing in any previous comics about this, but suddenly Thor is waxing about her as being the woman he loves, complete with ludicrously over-the-top kiss scenes, and no indication as to why Thor cares so much about her.
• Strawman Has a Point: In spite of them being colossal jackasses, most fans sided with Captain America and Hawkeye, viewing them to be the Only Sane Men in their disgust of the true nature of the Lehnsherr siblings' relationship than with Wasp and Wolverine's sympathies to it, finding Wolverine's sympathy for Pietro and Wanda's relationship to be another black mark on the Ultimate version of the character (with his pre-existing and disdained sexual proclivities) and wondering what the hell was wrong with the Wasp that she thought incest was normal and endearing.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Ultimates 3 completely abandoned the superhero deconstruction of the first two miniseries and featured instead a standard story of robot duplicates and a conflict with Magneto. And the awesome cinematic scenes of the first miniseries were replaced by shocking images taken straight from the worst moments of The Dark Age of Comic Books. As a result, many readers gave up on the series at this point.

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