Ultimate Burnout?

On a whim, I bought Ultimate Secrets last week, a character handbook for various characters in Marvel’s alternate Ultimate universe. I haven’t followed any of the Ultimate titles in several years, but I couldn’t resist the cheap synopses. Being a fanatic for their ’80s Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and their subsequent updates, I was struck by how many of the revamped, retold Ultimate characters are rather new, even in the main Marvel universe!

Ultimate Cable. Ultimate Deadpool. Ultimate Carnage. Ultimate Omega Red!

It got me thinking: How soon is the Ultimate universe likely to have caught up with the main Marvel U (and, in effect, be redundant)? It seemed the only way to determine this with any accuracy would be to track plotlines in Marvel U. against when they occurred in its Ultimate alternate.

I limited it to characters who debuted in roughly the same title in both universes. Working off some basic dates (e.g. 1961 for Fantastic Four, 1963 for (Uncanny) X-Men*, 2000 for Ultimate Spider-Man, 2004 for Ultimate Fantastic Four), here’s how things break down:

When a character debuts less quickly in the Ultimate universe, he or she arrives, on average, just over 4 years later than in the Marvel Universe.

Therefore, it could be said that the Ultimate universe is moving at roughly twice the speed of the Marvel Universe, sure. But, considering that only 5 of the characters sampled arrived less quickly and 11 arrived more quickly — double the Johnny-Come-Latelys — it seems more appropriate to weight the results all together, factoring in the other characters who debuted on the same time table in both universes.

When taken all together, debuts in the Ultimate universe occur a total of 83 years quicker! That means each Ultimate character appearing on the scene is, on average, arriving approximately 4 years more quickly than in the original Marvel universe. Think of it in “dog years:” 1 Marvel year is equal to 4 Ultimate years.

Considering how quickly the Ultimate universe is burning through the 40-plus years of Marvel storylines, the following result shouldn’t be too surprising, but it still seems much more immediate than I originally expected: If the Marvel Universe has officially been around 47 years (counting from Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, not the earlier Timely stuff), then the Ultimate universe will be entirely caught up with our current 2008 storylines in about a dozen years itself — Ultimate Secret Invasion comes 2012. By that time, Marvel will have gained 4 more years of new material, thus 1 additional Ultimate year.

The Ultimate Universe – Redundancy sets in in T-minus 5 years…