LogFAQs > #954594604

Nichtcrawler X posted...

I read all of it Ultimate, so I am very aware of the fluctuations in quality. But I would assume 616 is no different. From the sheer quantity, I would expect both good and terrible comics.

True, but the main difference is that with the mainline universe you're mostly dealing with bad comics now and then, whereas with Ultimate you're often dealing with terrible ideas baked right into the core of the character.

It's because in a lot of ways the original universe is self-correcting. If I release a terrible character in the main universe it doesn't become popular, other writers stop using it, and it vanishes until someone else eventually brings it up again to be ironic or to just kill them off. By definition the characters who tend to become the most popular are the ones who are organically built up and that can shake off bad stories. The characters become popular because they're good.

But with the Ultimate universe, you're trying to rebuild the most popular characters from the ground up, to fit your own interpretation of them. But if your interpretation is kind of crap, then you've essentially built your own flaws into the characters that future writers may never be able to fix, and which lead to those versions being far less popular than their original counterparts. You're not making good characters who become popular by virtue of their quality, you're taking popular characters and trying to remake them into something else. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

The Ultimate version of any given character isn't necessarily automatically going to be terrible, but it can easily wind up far, far worse than the original.
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