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Um, did I miss something?  The promos for Mighty Avengers #20 promised two things: a Thor guest appearance and a surprise ending that no one would see coming.   Thor appeared, that’s true.  It was a good guest shot, too.  He showed up at The Wasp’s funeral and gave a nice eulogy of sorts.  Then he hauled Hank Pym off for a private time of mourning, away from the media circus that her funeral had become.

The surprise?  Honestly, I don’t know what it was.  This isn’t like the surprise at the end of Batman 680 which wasn’t very surprising, but at least I knew that revelation that Jezebel Jett was really the Black Glove was the surprise.  Here?  I honestly don’t know.  That Hank Pym was angry with Tony Stark?  That he chastised him at the funeral?  Hawkeye yelling at Norman Osborn?  Osborn smiling a little?  This has to be the biggest oversell I can ever remember in comics promotion.

Ranting aside, it wasn’t a bad issue.  Not at all.  But you can’t promise something that big and deliver absolutely nothing without disappointing some fans.  Fans with blogs; I’m just saying.

How good was Secret Invasion?  That whole mini-series rocked from start to finish.  After reading the last issue, I am left with a couple of unanswered questions, though.

Niggly question #1  - how did Hawkeye (the teenage chick, not the real one) go from almost dead to walking around and talking in, like, five minutes?

Niggly question #2 - Why did Nick Fury snub Dum Dum and the Contessa?  I admit that I don’t know much about these SHIELD characters, but I just didn’t get that at all.

Mockingbird is back!  Woo hoo!  (I know that’s not a question, but still - woo hoo!)

So the Secret Invasion mega-crossover is flowing directly into the Dark Reign meg-crossover?  I’d be annoyed about that, but SI was so good & Dark Reign looks so promising, I’m just psyched.

Is Emma Frost a bad guy now?  What about Namor?

I can’t wait to start Dark Reign.

Quicksilver is a tool in any universe.  In the MMU, he was a bad guy, then a good guy, then bad, then good, then baddish, and now he’s just… out there.  He lost his speed powers and has the power to restart  the powers of de-powered mutants.

In the Ultimate Universe, he’s a teenager who was bad then good then kind of bad then dead.  As mentioned in Round 22, he and his sister have a relationship that is either creepy or just plain sick.  Not sure which it was, but now they’re both dead, at least for the moment.  I suspect they will both be back.

Winner - MMU Quicksilver, but it’s nothing to be proud of.  Both versions of Quicksilver suck.  MMU Quicksilver just sucks slightly less.

Tomorrow - We take a break to review Batman R.I.P.

Both versions of the Scarlet Witch share the same basic origin and powers.  She is the daughter of Magneto, with the power to alter reality.  She started out bad and turned good.

In the Main Marvel Universe, she turned bad again.   Driven mostly insane when she was reminded that she once had children (sort of), she went on a behind-the-scenes reality-altering rampage that destroyed the Avengers.  Really, that’s what happened.  When the gig was up, she warped reality farther, creating the whole House of M mess.  Then, she got mad and undid it all.  Now, she is living a quiet life in Europe with seemingly no memory of her past life.  When Hawkeye went to seek her out, the two of them did the nasty but resolved nothing.

Ultimate Scarlet Witch is an insanely-hot, teenaged version of the character.  Unfortunately, the creepy, possibly incestuous relationship she has with her brother negates most of her coolness.  Plus, she’s currently dead. 

Winner – MMU Scarlet Witch

Tomorrow - Quicksilver

MMU Bishop: Born in a dystopian future where Mutants have been hunted near extinction, he traveled back through time to stop the one incident that lead to his predicament – the death of the X-Men.  He completed his mission when he prevented Onslaught from killing his companions.  Then he became a cop for a while.  Now he’s turned into something of a bad guy, intent on killing a little baby because he thinks SHE is the cause of his bleak future.  Maybe he didn’t read the Onslaught story line. 

Ultimate Bishop is an older version of a character currently incarcerated in the Ultimate Universe.   While he gets points for eventually marrying Ultimate Psyloche, he is little more than a tool for Ultimate Cable and he quickly got himself killed.

Winner – MMU Bishop

Tomorrow – The Scarlett Witch!

Charles Francis Xavier – the most powerful telepath on the planet, except that there are now a ton of other telepaths that seem just as if not more powerful – is the founder and sometimes leader of the X-Men.  He was once close friends with Magneto, but their fundamental disagreement lead to Xavier being confined to a wheelchair.  In the MMU, his creepy, inappropriate feelings for a teenaged Jean Grey caused him to turn into Onslaught and led to the temporary ‘deaths’ of many of the world’s superheroes.  In the Ultimate universe, his creepy, inappropriate feelings for a teenaged Jean Grey just led to Scott Summers getting a little mad.

MMU Professor X’s legs got better, then he suffered another accident that put him back in a wheelchair.  Then he regained the use of his legs but lost his telepathy, but then he got his telepathy back.   

Ultimate Xavier was first shown to be more devious than his MMU counterpart, but with all the retcons of MMU Professor X over the years, that doesn’t really hold up anymore.  Both are pretty willing to use their powers to mess with other people’s minds.  Ultimate Prof X just doesn’t protest otherwise as much as the MMU version.

Winner – Ultimate Professor X

Tomorrow – Bishop!

Magneto is an extremely powerful mutant bad guy.  He and Charles Xavier were once friends, but their ideals took them down different roads.  I guess you could say the friendship was officially over the day that Mags severed Chuck’s spine.

The MMU Magneto has been dead (but it didn’t take), reformed (likewise, didn’t take), de-aged (but not really, that was another guy), dead again (another guy again, but a different other guy), and de-powered (in M-Day - guaranteed not to last very long).

The Ultimate Magneto may be even more powerful than his MMU Counterpart ever was.  As of this writing, he has recently slapped Thor silly & stolen his hammer, and is now on a quest to wipe out most of Earth’s population.  From the looks of Ultimatum #1, he’s got the power to back that plan up.  He’s mad as heck that his kids got offed and he’s not gonna take it anymore.  Oh, yeah, and his wife was TOTALLY smoking hot.

Winner - Ultimate Magneto.

Tomorrow - Gambit

This is a tough one for me.   Both versions started out with essentially the same origin.  The Beast initially looked basically human, with some brutish characteristics.  Then he was forcibly mutated further into the classic fuzzy blue version.  Then he was de-mutated back to the brutish look.  The Ultimate Beast is holding at that point now.  The MMU Beast was un-de-mutated back to the fuzzy blue look, then secondarily re-un-de-muated to a cat-like “Beauty and the Beast” version of the character.

The Beast was among the most enjoyable characters in the Marvel Universe.  Then Grant Morrison got a hold of him and turned him into the dour grumpy cat dude he is today.

The Ultimate Beast was dead for a good while.  His resurrection story (he almost died, but didn’t, Professor X & Nick Fury conspired to keep him hidden so he could work on a cure for the legacy virus) kind of sucked.   As of this writing, he may or may not be dead again thanks to Ultimatum.

Winner – Classic MMU Beast.  Way better than the current MMU Beast of the maybe-maybe-not dead Ultimate version

Tomorrow – Magneto!

Moon Knight is Marvel’s answer to Batman.  He’s rich, dark, brooding, and has lots of really cool gadgets.  Unlike Batman, he’s nutty as a fruitcake. 

The MMU Moon Knight was a regular guy, then he got super powers, then he (I think) lost them through unexplained means.  For a while he had magic weapons, then he had non-magical copies of the magic weapons, now he’s got new & different weapons.  For a while, he wore a costume made of adamantium.  Lately, he’s gone completely nuts.

The Ultimate Moon Knight, like 94.2% of the heroes in the Ultimate Universe, gained his powers through the Super Soldier program.  He suffers from multiple personality disorder.  He pretty much makes the MMU Moon Knight look rational. 

Winner – MMU Moon Knight.  A little more skilled, a little less crazy.

Tomorrow - Beast

Until recently, the Main Marvel Universe Nick Fury held little appeal for me.  His recent handling by Brian Michael Bendis in the Secret Invasion cross-over has really upped his standing in my estimation. A WWII veteran and super-spy, Fury has the vigor of a much younger man thanks to the ‘Infinity formula’. 

Ultimate Nick Fury was an early test subject for the Super Soldier program.  Whether or not this gave him any lasting degree of super strength is not clear, but it has certainly retarded his aging process.  He’s a bit of a snake, teaming with Doctor Doom at one point in order to further his own agenda.  Ultimate Nick’s character design is based on Samuel L. Jackson, one very scary & cool cat.

Winner – MMU Nick wins, mostly because Ultimate Nick got booted out of the Ultimate Universe and into the Squadron Supreme-verse.

Tomorrow – Moon Knight!