Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #3

For many months I have been accumulating issues of Marvel's Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates. I finally had the chance to dig in the weekend before last. So far -- I have just finished #8 -- I can report that writer Jonathan Hickman and artists Esad Ribic and Brandon Peterson deliver a complex, satisfying narrative that is simultaneously futuristic and thoroughly grounded in time present. Here is a synopsis of the plot lifted from issue #6 when Nick Fury travels to the New Mexico desert to try to recruit a disillusioned Steve Rogers, a.k.a, Captain America:

Our old friend Reed Richards created a Darwin bubble. He accelerated the evolution of generations of humans and brought a future city back to the past -- to the here and now . . . 

They destroyed Western Europe and we lost almost half of our fleet in an engagement with them. 

It's as bad as it gets. We have . . . no solutions.

Here are five scanned pages from Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #3 that illustrate the Nick Fury quote regarding the defeat of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Ultimates at the hands of Reed Richards and his Children of Tomorrow in The City. Note Thor's Kamikaze assault in the last two pages.