The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Grant Morrison
Art By: Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Mark Irwin, Keith Champagne, Jaime Mendoza, Gabe Eltaeb, David Baron
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: March 25, 2015

Mind Fuck

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's finally here, the comic that started it all......... Well, at least for all the characters that we've been reading about month after month.  The infamous cursed comic that will destroy the world and infect our minds....... Okay, I'm not sure that I want to read and review this anymore....... but me being a cunning man of action full of musk and guile, I'll take on that challenge and do my best to try and make sense of this Morrison mind fuck.  Alright, let's quit all the jibber jabber and get into Ultra Comics and see what all the hubbub has been about.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with that all too familiar warning about reading this comic and a little ominous back story about how Ultra has come back to the beginning of the story but it's all for not because whatever he's afraid of has followed him......... Okay, let the continuous mind fucks begin!  Once we're past our initial fourth wall breaking warning, we're given another by a man behind a desk telling us that we can still turn back if we want and when we obviously continue we find out that Ultra was created to be a hero by us all concentrating our thoughts on the story and each individual reader is the one that is bringing Ultra to life and putting him out there in the Multiverse to combat against the ultimate threat.  I'm telling you this is weird as hell to read because not only do we have the people who created Ultra Comics talking to us, we have Ultra talking to us and we even have us talking to us by small comments at the bottom of the panel............ It's a fourth wall breaking, meta, meta comic that we the reader exist in............ I don't know what I'm reading but I know I've never read anything like it before........ Which I guess you could take as a good or a bad thing........... I really don't know.  With the Ultragem implanted in Ultra that allows him to become linked with us, our hero is sent to his mission.

Ultra finds himself in a strange apocalyptic New York, where he fights strange distorted versions of the Justice League that seem to want to take possession of a giant Rubik's cube looking dealy and once they're defeated, Ultra delivers it to the headquarters of a bunch of kid heroes called the Neighborhood Guard.......... Only thing is, once we get to the headquarters we find a bunch of adults who are all apparently called Ultra and before our Ultra can wrap his head around what's going on, we find out that this entire experience has been a trap.  These people that Ultra has come across are all cannibals and the distorted Justice League was actually protecting the cube from these monsters that want to it as a gateway to another world.  Ultra gets strapped up and we meet the head honcho Ultraa, who eats the Ultragem out of our hero's head.............. Yeah, that shit happened.  Don't worry about this Ultraa though because Ultra with the help of our imaginations, allow him to turn the Ultragem into corrosive material that takes the baddie down............ But apparently, he was the only one stopping the thing in the cube....... Which is The Gentry and before we see him with Ultra, we see that it was actually the original man behind the desk warning us about proceeding throughout this book............. Oh My God!  There is no way to describe what is happening here that makes any lick of sense.

In the end, Ultra goes up against The Gentry and even though we helped him get his power back and even used our criticism of the way the story is progressing as a way to defeat the enemy...... Apparently Ultra and us aren't shit because The Gentry won't be stopped and before the issue closes Ultra begs us to shut the door that we've opened between us and him so that the Gentry can't use us to gain access to our world......... I'm a very fragile, impressionable boy and I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep tonight.

That's it for this issue of The Multiversity and our foray into Ultra Comics and man am I beyond confused by what I read.......... Well, confused isn't exactly correct.  I understand what went down in the comic but I'm not sure how to feel about it.  This is definitely a original story that I've never seen before and I kind of hope that I never do again because of how much it fucks with you while you're reading it.  Think about how normal Morrison books try to fuck with you and times that by a hundred and you might be around where this comic lives.  This comic exists in a world all it's own and even for all my bitching, it is very cool and it's an awesome concept for how the evil is spreading throughout the Multiverse by connecting with the readers of this comic book.  The art is fantastic and after you read this a couple of times you might be able to wrap your head around it and see it as the magnum opus to the Multiversity that it is.  

Bits and Pieces:

I have never read a story like this before in my life and this book's ability to actually draw you into this world was a bit nerve wracking and at more than one point I actually felt like the book was talking to me personally.......... That's a hell of a feat.  So if you're ready to have your mind turned sideways by a fourth wall breaking, meta, meta story that puts you directly into the action..... STOP NOW!  Nah, you should totally read it and become like one of us.

9/10