The Ultimates #4: The Power of Four

“Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff.

Time works the same way.” 

The opening on the surface level makes little sense to those unaware of a very specific, fleeting moment of early internet history. The foundational text that the quote is pulled from is The Zybounre Clock, a proposed video game from a Something Awful forum. It was a trope-filled, faux-intellectual riff on steampunk time travel that never materialized past some text excerpts and a few pieces of artwork. However, it’s become a bit of internet apocrypha and the opening metaphor of four balls is enthrallingly dumb. It makes no sense but on a surface reading, feels like a compelling way to explain the rippling nature of time travel. 

The Ultimates #4 – written by Deniz Camp with art and colors from Phil Noto, and lettering by VC’s Travis Lanham – offers a look at the origins of Reed Richards’s Doom in this universe. Rolling the clock back multiple times, the issue shifts away from the recruitment drive for the Ultimates to learn the prologue of this world’s smartest man. Jumping between the days of the optimistic thinker, to the awkward wooer of Sue Storm, to the rebellious explorer, and then captive of the Maker, each strand of history flows across the page. Every page of the issue is broken into four equal, wide-screen panels. Filling each panel is another point of Reed’s life, maintaining the same time frame on the subsequent page. 

When reading this week’s issue of The Ultimates, the metaphor came straight to mind, thanks to the use of the four timelines and the looming notions of changing the past. Camp’s scripting is a lot more coherent and Noto’s artwork is streamlined in a way that everything about the Zybourne Clock isn’t, but there is an odd resonance to the ideas in both. The festering wound that lies at the heart of Ultimate Doom – a twisted and broken version of Reed – is the axis of these four panels, and the ball that hopefully can be pushed from the cliff, to follow the Zybourne metaphor. 

From the start of the issue, Reed is told he needs to think in four dimensions and that idea creates the fractal effect of the recurring panels. A typical structural approach to memories would be to use a chain-link metaphor, as moments interline and cascade into one another. Here, Noto spools each one of these experiences like a film reel. Where the normal approach would be to feel one reel into the next for a continuous playback, Noto and Camp instead break out four separate projectors to display each reel. The effect created here is the juxtaposition of moments, echoing flashes of pain, joy, triumph, defeat, and more. 

Much like the moments on the page, it is increasingly difficult to delineate and talk about the writing versus art in this issue. Just as the four times are displayed at once, the art and writing must be considered in the same way. The scripting indicates the effective moments and the dialogue feels directed to be echoed in the precise way it occurs on the page. Meanwhile, the art and framing targets pulling similar compositions, blockings, and expressions to sell the interwoven narrative. Reed, Doom, and the Maker all stand in particular ways that mirror one another, heads are tiled in harsh comparisons. The use of close-ups, medium shots, and cramped wide angles all feel intentional from the jump. It’s disorientating to try and discuss them in a purely text format, as the nature of reducing the synthesis to just words loses something in the translation. 

Panel one is dedicated to the younger Reed, the gifted teenager who excels beyond everyone around him, and moving forward in time to meet the other members of the would-be Fantastic Four. The second focuses on the mission that sends Marvel’s first family into space which leads into Reed’s time as the Maker’s prisoner. Next is the third, which focuses on a time adjacent to the start of this new universe, publishing-wise, after Doom’s freedom but not quite the present as he watches the history of this world. Finally, the fourth panels are dedicated to the present of the book, as Iron Lad tries to speak with Doom about his role on the team.  

Focusing the entire issue around the secret history of Doom makes for a fascinating character study that cuts to the tragedy of the wider Ultimate Universe. From the Jonathan Hickman penned Ultimate Invasion and Ultimate Spider-Man, to Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men, there is a real sense of something feeling wrong about this world. It’s been made clear that it is a direct result of the Maker’s tinkering but nothing makes that more apparent than Doom’s existence. By the fact that he is this world’s Reed Richards, he seems, pardon the pun, doomed to suffer. His body, his family, and his sense of being are all stripped from him, in what amounts to a twisted science experiment. 

Just as the artwork reinforces the four separate periods, so too does the coloring from Noto. The first-panel position introduces plenty of soft, warmer colors that convey an optimistic tone, feeling in line with an origin story for the Fantastic Four. There’s a sick sense of symmetry as those warm tones creep into the second position, contrasting as Reed descends further and further into a personal hell. There’s a noticeable shift in the hues as Reed is taken by the Maker, adding in more complex grays and browns to muddy the hopeful palette. Once Doom is born and established in the relative present, he is shrouded in metaphorical and literal dimness. The deeper hues serve to highlight how the light has been snuffed from the man. 

The framework of the Zybourne Clock is present in the mind when thinking about the spirit of collaborator for this issue. A reason why Zybourne and countless other projects failed is an overreliance on the idea and an unwillingness to meet collaborators on a real level. From page one of Ultimates #4, that notion is dissuaded as Camp and Noto operate in true lockstep. There is a simple at the core of the high concept idea of this issue, which is the ultimate expression of pain and loss that cloaks Doom. Starting at that simple place and then building out the narrative and formal constraints allows for the creative duo to drive the issue into transcendental territory, using that baseline as the foundation for the experimentation. 

“Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff.”

Time is the recurring element of The Ultimates as a book, just as it was for The Zybourne Clock. In the little bits of info released about it, there was an idea of rewriting reality to accelerate human evolution in the scrapped video game. Again, it makes for an interesting parallel to the Maker’s scheme from the outset of this universe. Where Ultimates thrives is in the sense of foreboding with the narrative ticking clock regarding the Maker’s return. Doom makes clear he only sees the past as his viable future. His charting of the future is to replace the ball on the cliff through temporal displacement, which stands in direct opposition to the rest of those living in this reality. Camp and Noto make clear with issue Doom will stop at nothing, even the destruction of his body and mind, to achieve that displacement.