My fondness for Marvel's The Ultimates line faltered with Who Killed the Scarlet Witch?

After wading through a superhero sex tape and suggestions of incest among Earth's mightiest heroes, readers are treated to the assassination of the Scarlet Witch on a New York City street. But the "investigation" that follows the shooting, laughable though it is, takes both heroes and readers in incomprehensible directions and includes cameo appearances by the likes of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Ka-Zar and Shanna, apparently for no other reason than their appearance might bolster sales among their fans.

The whole Captain America/Black Panther subplot is fairly ludicrous. Hawkeye's self-destructive moodiness is tiresome. Thor ... is he even the same guy from earlier books? Look-alike robots? What?

There's a lot of punching, if that helps. Large doses of bared womanflesh, too. I mean, the book is laden with high levels of sex and lust, violence and anger, and relatively little reason to care about the characters or drunkenly staggering plot.

Given the creative team onboard for his book, it's almost inconceivable that the result was so bad. Believe me, it is. Given the successes of earlier books in the series, I'm at a loss to explain what went wrong.

Let's hope they can recover. Maybe this whole issue was just a bad dream.