THE CREATORS: Written by Mark Millar (save for a Chuck Austen fill-in on issue #14), with regular artists Adam Kubert and Danny Miki

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Six.  Not desperately impressive.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2002: The second half of the Gambit fill-in story; an article by Xavier about his ideology; the World Tour storyline; a month of sentimentality with Xavier and Magneto; and the "Hellfire & Brimstone" arc, based loosely on Dark Phoenix

I can never quite make up my mind about this book.

Mark Millar is not a writer who's really on my wavelength.  He has a tendency to produce stories that have very good central ideas, and then at the last moment back off from taking them seriously and collapse in an orgy of deliberate silliness.  His first Ultimates storyline is a case in point - several issues of character-based build-up, and then he completely blows it in the last act by producing an issue full of Freddie Prinze Jr books.  He doesn't manage to bind these two sides of his writing together, and he doesn't really seem to want to.

But then, I seem to be in the minority in thinking that Ultimates blew its first storyline.  There are plenty of people who evidently like Millar's mixture of unpretentious, tongue-in-cheek excessive action, with the occasional interesting idea thrown in.  He has his market, and he serves it well.  After all, this is the second-biggest seller in the line.  It's got to be doing something right.

And once in a while - such as the shamelessly sentimental issue of a brainwashed Magneto talking a doubting Xavier into continuing the X-Men - Millar produces something really very good indeed, a story which works at face value as a nice sentimental piece, and works even better when you realise that Xavier is just listening to an echo of his own earlier brainwashing, parroting his opinions back at him.  Great issue.  Wish Millar did that sort of thing more often.  There were some excellent ideas in the Dark Phoenix storyline as well, albeit that the plot as a whole seemed to lack focus.

This is another book which has suffered from inconsistent art, but it's been particularly glaring here.  If you were looking for an artist who would fit in relatively well with Adam Kubert and could fill in for him halfway through a storyline (and bear in mind, that's a storyline that you're planning to keep in print as a trade paperback), various names might spring to mind.  Chris Bachalo and Kaare Andrews would probably not be among them, but that's who we got.  Both very good artists, at least when Bachalo remembers to tell the story, but also both very distinctive artists whose work stands out a mile.  Not really ideal people to do that sort of fill-in work.

Generally, Ultimate X-Men isn't my cup of tea.  But Millar's got himself a loyal audience, no denying it, and he keeps them entertained.  On its own terms, a success - and really, those are the terms that matter.

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