Mark Millar is a tease.

It's pretty obvious by this point that Ultimate War isn't really going to do anything - it's just a three month build-up for the big fight between the Ultimates and the X-Men next month.  This issue, the Ultimates don't fight the X-Men, for the third month running.  Next issue, presumably, they fight, and the X-Men leave at the end in order to return to the plot of their own title.  At least, I assume they fight.  If they don't, there's going to be some very annoyed readers out there.

Given that the point is to do a big fight scene, I'm still a bit concerned that Chris Bachalo is doing the art on this series.  Big set-piece action sequences have never been his forte.  Yes, this series has shown something of a swing back in favour of clarity in his storytelling.  But I can't quite imagine a big fight with ten characters drawn by Chris Bachalo coming out as anything other than a muddle.  And that puts a damper on my enthusiasm.

That said, Bachalo does produce some lovely artwork in this issue, so maybe I'm being overly pessimistic.  The opening sequence with President Bush being shown around the safehouse town of Lincoln gets the small-town look perfectly.  Iron Man's bombing raid on the X-Men's headquarters is pretty impressive as well.  But it's the choreography that tends to bring him down, and that still worries me.

The plotting is a bit mixed.  On the one hand, the focal point of the issue is putting more build-up on the Ultimates and X-Men's fight next month, and it achives that well enough.  But there are a couple of scenes which strain credibility a little too much.  The Black Widow letting herself get shot by secret service guards to prove how effective they are, for one thing - apparently they were using non-lethal ammunition especially, which begs the question of what they'd have done if an attacker actually had shown up, and why the President should have been particularly reassured to know that his guards are capable of remembering their script.

And then there's Xavier and Magneto both coming up with the same "I'll follow you home from our rendezvous" plan.  It's a little too convenient, that - not to mention that both schemes are so transparent it's amazing that either of them falls for it.

Anyhow, it's a build-up.  The series stands and falls now on whether it can deliver a killer fight scene in issue #4.  If this was Hitch, I'd say yes.  But it's Bachalo.  It's Bachalo.

Rating: B

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