WWE has been in a major rut lately. They have all the talent in the world and yet they’ve spent the last several months mismanaging themselves. So much time and effort has been spent on shoving Cena and Orton in our faces as overly dominant heroes that everyone else looks like shit. This is even worse when they bring in older top guys like Triple H to tell everyone that he and the Undertaker have to have a big, high-profile match because everyone in the back smells and none of them are on their level. Most attempts to build up new talent screeches to a halt because they’d rather see how said wrestler would react on a professional level if they started looking like a joke day in and day out.

I can only hope they hit rock bottom (no pun intended) over the past few months because the company should know better than to be this lousy on a regular basis. Luckily, they’ve started to get enough forward momentum in the last couple months. R-Truth has taken his character to another level. Christian and Orton are having good matches. Good wrestlers are still having good matches when nobody’s watching.

A major happening came from this week’s Raw. The next PPV, Money in the Bank, which is in Chicago, will have John Cena defending the WWE Championship against CM Punk in what is billed to be Punk’s farewell performance. The writing was on the wall with this one if you follow the backstage hijinx of the company online, but Raw’s ending added a new level of interest in it.

In a tables match between Cena and R-Truth, Punk interfered to help Truth win. With a weakened Cena selling something for the first time in maybe a year, Punk sat upon the entrance ramp and had this to say.

Was it legit? Of course not! Like they’d have him talk that long and choose only then to cut him off. But it was cool! It was really, really cool and does a good job of building up the PPV as a situation where something intriguing could happen. It was shocking and buzzworthy.

Some of the more hardcore fans (or “smarks”) out there have said that the promo alienates the casual fans because they don’t know what he’s talking about. Too many inside references. That’s bullshit, of course. Anyone can pick up what he’s talking about and figure out what they don’t get. Still, the smarks get some extra flavor from Punk’s remarks as it speaks for the most of them. The response reminds me of a lot of Grant Morrison’s recent DC Comics work, only even more straightforward. Just because you haven’t read decades of Jack Kirby work doesn’t mean you can’t read through Final Crisis.

That got me thinking. David Uzumeri has been annotating Grant Morrison’s comics for the past few years. Maybe I could annotate CM Punk’s speech and give the casual fans something to go with an already fantastic rant. Let’s give it a shot.

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Before I bring the whole Ultimate Edit Trilogy to rest, I just needed to write up the page-by-page details that explain all the endless references and dropped gags. Enjoy.

WEEK ONE

Cover

– References are made to Josie and the Pussycats, Squadron Supreme/Squadron Sinister where the original Nighthawk is from and, naturally, Heroes for Hire.

Page 1

– The line about Spider-Man looking like a toddler is commentary on David Lafuente’s weird proportions in his Ultimate Spider-Man work.

Page 2

– Spiders-Man is a character from Earth X who was given Inhuman powers and it turned him into a scaly-looking Spider-Man with the ability to create illusions. With Mark Millar’s return to writing Ultimate comics, he introduced a new Spider-Man to Ultimate Avengers. He’s a clone of Peter Parker, kept in a cell with a Hannibal Lecter personality and some kind of mind power. While I’m sure he isn’t based on Spiders-Man specifically, I’ve always just referred to him as Ultimate Spiders-Man. It fits.

Page 3

– During the production of Ultimates 3, there was a nixed cover by Frank Cho that showed Wolverine having sex with Magda, mother of Scarlet Witch. The final version would have had a blanket added on to cover her up, but the released sketch showed a giant bare ass.

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It took about nine months, but the comic miniseries Ultimatum had finally finished, meaning that the 4th Letter fan-favorite Ultimatum Edit is kaput as well. As always, ManiacClown and I had a blast and we hope you enjoyed it as well.

Thing is, we make a lot of references to random things that I’m sure fly over the heads of many. To help in retrospect, here’s a little page-by-page guide to what was going on in our heads.

WEEK ONE

Page 1

– The narration box is quoting the horrible Fantastic Four cartoon theme from the mid-90’s.

– The events Reed and Sue discuss are based on the Ultimate Fantastic Four/X-Men Annual two-parter that acted as a prelude to Ultimatum. It involves a bunch of superheroes from the future coming to the present in an attempt to change their reality, as their status quo has Invisible Woman ruling the world alongside Namor with an iron fist. In one scene, the regular Sue got in Wolverine’s face by unsheathing claws just like his, but made of her invisible force fields. She didn’t slice him or anything. She just whipped them out to threaten him. THEY ARE INVISIBLE!

– Thing is bringing up how that robot looks an awful lot like the scanner droids from the beginning of Empire Strikes Back.

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Ultimate Edit has come and gone. I hope you had as much fun reading it as we had making it. Rereading some of the stuff, I notice how awkward bits of the dialogue come off. There are some references that are either obscure or too outdated to work months later. For the hell of it, let’s look back on the series with some Ultimate Edit Annotations.

As for how the Edit got started, I had posted on the Batman’s Shameful Secret sub-forum at Something Awful about how I was playing with the idea of giving Ultimates 3 the same treatment that MightyGodKing gave Civil War among others and Funnybook Babylon gave Infinite Crisis #4. ManiacClown, who I knew only as the guy with the rapping Etrigan avatar, insisted I go through with it and asked to volunteer.

I later emailed MightyGodKing about whether I was stepping on his toes with this. Though he hadn’t read the first issue yet, he was debating between that and the also awful Countdown: Arena #1. He was leaning towards Arena and ultimately went with it, leaving me free to take apart Loeb’s latest work.

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