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Review: Ultimate X #5

By | July 1st, 2011
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Written by Jeph Loeb
Illustrated by Arthur Adams

The companion volume to the X-Men event of 2010! Fighting for the future of mutantkind, the X-Men are locked in battle with Bastion. When Magik is gravely injured in battle, she instinctively flees to the sanctuary of Limbo — only to fall into the clutches of a longtime adversary hoping to wrest the powerful Soulsword — and control of Limbo — from her grasp. Now, a small team of X-Men venture in after her, but they are met only by unexpected peril. And in X-Factor, the mutant hunter Bastion has sent the Mutant Response Division and Bolivar Trask after X-Factor with one mission: Kill them all. And it seems thus far that all is going according to plan. (This is what Marvel.com says, for some reason. I hope someone got fired for that blunder!)

The future of the Ultimate X-Men — revealed after the jump! Whether or not you should even give a crap — also revealed, assuming you trust my opinions without reservation!

And so Ultimate X comes to its end. That the series isn’t continuing past this first arc should shock no one, really. There’s a new Ultimate X-Men rolling out later in the summer (or whenever), and to be perfectly honest, thinking that Art Adams could keep up an ongoing title for more than this is probably folly in and of itself. (That said, 120 pages of new Art Adams pencils is worth just about any publishing circumstance.) Still, after a year and a half, all we’ve got is “a new team formed” — a new X-quo. One in which there are, to quote Jean Grey, “no X-Men.” Until Ultimate X-Men #1, anyway.

Here’s the plot of the series, for those of you who were sleeping the last eighteen months: after Ultimatum, when everything went to hell and everyone died and so on, someone had to go around collecting mutants to perpetuate their never-ending nihilistic race war, and so that job fell to Jean Grey (now living as a goth named Karen) and Jimmy Hudson (Wolverine’s son, who has all the powers of Wolverine, just presumably in reduced son-size format). Rounding out the team are Derek, who is apparently the new Archangel in function if not in name; Liz Allen, alias Firestar, on loan from Ultimate Spider-Man; and the Hulk, because the Hulk needed something to do. Meanwhile, Magneto’s son (and former government hero) Pietro has been recruiting his own band of evil mutants. They nearly face off — but not quite. Fin.

Jeph Loeb’s trip through the Ultimate Universe has been a strange and tumultuous one. He started off helping to merge the Ultimate Universe and the Supreme Powerverse, which led to nothing in particular, really. He then did Ultimates 3, which had Doctor Doom sieging the team with robots for some reason. This led to Ultimatum, which had Magneto destroying New York City and killing half of the Ultimate characters, but apparently that was Doctor Doom’s real plan (somehow), so Doom got killed too. Then came New Ultimates, which was mostly about Thor coming back to life and giving Frank Cho excuses to draw very Frank Cho stuff. At the same time as New Ultimates, we’ve had Ultimate X, which has sort of retroactively become a transition story rather than a continuation in its own right. Ultimate X looks like it’ll be Loeb’s last Ultimate venture for the time being, and looking back, it’s clear that he aspired to some kind of master plan running through his various bursts of story, but to be frank, I’ll be damned if I can figure out what that master plan was, other than “if it ain’t topping the sales charts, hit it with a hammer until its face is broken.”

Perhaps the real master plan of Loeb’s was working with nothing but superstar artists, and of all of his collaborators, Art Adams is by far the best. The fourth issue of Ultimate X suffered in comparison to the usual high standards of Adams’s work — new-father-itis, leading to side effects such as disappearing backgrounds. Here, Adams is back on point, making sure the series goes out in supreme style. These pages are colored right from the pencils, and like Quitely, Adam’s work is almost preferable that way — so tightly composed and meticulously detailed that one can only imagine how many tiny perfectionist details would risk being lost in the inking stage. If the goal of Ultimate X seems now to be rather unambitious, it’s more than made up for by the gorgeous artwork by a master whose grasp of storytelling is such that I’m sure the issue would read just as clearly without any word balloons.

Continued below

Like (I believe) every other Loeb Ultimate project, this one ends on a cliffhanger, and an unusually synchronous one with the 616 universe’s goings-on this week; the last member of the Brotherhood stands revealed, with no explanation as to why or how they’re there. Maybe Ultimate X-Men will take up that baton, but for the most part it feels like that shock at the end of an 80s horror movie — what’s-her-face is laid out in the boat, relaxing after murdering Jason’s mom, when suddenly Jasons’ corpse hurls out of the water and starts choking her out like a bad guy wrestler putting Hulk Hogan in the sleeper hold. Of course, none of this is quite so dramatic, although it’s equally as puzzling and arbitrary a storytelling decision as any given 80s horror movie or pro wrestling match. Presumably Loeb meant to advance it in a world where Ultimate X lasted more than five issues. Considering his previous Ultimate books, though — probably not.

On the whole, Ultimate X is maybe a bit more satisfying than, say, Ultimates 3, but it still falls firmly into the “stuff happens” edict of Jeph Loeb’s modern-day Marvel work, where — just as advertised — stories are mostly defined by stuff happening for seemingly no reason, given weight only by purple narration. On the plus side, though, this is a comic book that gives us Art Adams drawing Hulk vs. Sabretooth as some kind of early Christmas (or Hanukkah, or whatever) present. As a work of writing, you’re safe skipping it, but for anyone who wants to see one of comics’ living legends doing what he does best, it’s unmissable.

Final Verdict: 7.5 / If you love Art Adams as much as me, anyway


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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