Ultimate Mercenary Reading Order
- I can't imagine what reading all of this nonsense in chronological order will be like.
- – Masterplan Lad, The Liminals #1
Ultimate Mercenary started off simple enough, but grew into an epic tale with a whole bunch of forking paths along the way. (And also was written super out of order.) Here's an approximation of a simple reading guide:
- The cast comes together, has adventures, and transcends existence in Ultimate Mercenary.
- There are a bunch of Infinite Leadership Crisis issues that take place during UM #7 that haven't been written yet, and indeed, may never be.
- From there, they head into the absurdly overnamed Just Imagine Saxon Brenton and the Writers of RACC in: RACCies the Final! Symphony of Genesis, and currently-unrevealed fates happen to them!
Somewhere in those unrevealed fates, the cast splits off.
Ultimate Mercenary ends up on Earth-20:
- And slides straight into Ultimate Mercenary v20.
- His appearances in the Spoon of Destiny Saga take place after all currently-published UM v20 issues, because of course they do.
- His story will end in the impending The Last Days of Ultimate Mercenary.
The rest of the cast ends up in the Classic Looniverse:
- And ends up careening right into the events of Just Another Multi-Writer Cascade That Will Probably Never Have an Ending.
- Halfway thru that story, Masterplan Lad gets thrown back in time to Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #50, and shows up in issues #51-53 before making his way back to JAMWCTWPNHaE.
- After they're all back together, these characters form The Liminals in the early issues of WikiLull, but drop out of that plot after issue #11, well before it starts getting apocalyptic.
- They go on to star in The Liminals.
- Masterplan Lad then gets dragged into Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths!, where his struggle to maintain continuity between his roles in the Chaotic Add-On Cascade and his home series ends up having devastating personal consequences. The Liminals continues on in its wake.[1]
(Also, President Evil #6 (whose framing sequence is an epilogue to WikiLull, but never mind that) is a prequel, set before Masterplan Lad met Ultimate Mercenary and revealing some of his activities as part of the Knights Temporal. It's the earliest chronological story featuring MPL (he says so!), but you probably shouldn't read it first.)
There, that's not too complicated, right?
...right?
Footnotes
- ↑ Also issues 5-6 of The Liminals are a flashback set before issue 4 but that's OK, because those are meant to be read out of chronological order.
