THE CREATORS: Robert Kirkman writing, with art mostly from Ben Oliver and sometimes from Tom Raney.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2006: "Date Night", where everyone goes out for three issues; the Magician storyline; is Phoenix mad or just comically powerful?; Nightcrawler turns out to be utterly deranged; and the introduction of Cable and Bishop.

Robert Kirkman is a strange writer.  Sometimes he's a straightforward superhero writer with a classic love for the genre.  Sometimes he's a manic black comedian.  And sometimes he produces left-field hits like Marvel Zombies, though somehow he struggles to transfer that audience over to his other work.

Ultimate X-Men is still Kirkman's highest profile regular assignment. Sales on the Ultimate books seem to be in a slow but very noticeable long-term decline, and part of that may be the fact that the creators are getting noticeably less A-list.  You used to get Millar and Kubert on this title; now it's Kirkman and somebody called Ben Oliver, who's a fine artist, but doesn't have much name recognition behind him.  Ultimate X-Men used to be an event; it's now become just another feature of the landscape.

Still, as the one X-Men book that can still do traditional team book stories, it's a sensible use of Kirkman's talents.  But the stories this year have been hit and miss.  With the Magician arc, in which he introduced a new X-Man who turned out to be an insane traitor, he almost seemed to be bending over backwards to make the first half of the story annoying.  I can see what he was aiming for, but I'm not at all convinced that it worked.

We've also had a questionable annual where Nightcrawler turns out to be mad, and the problem may be that Kirkman doesn't write terribly convincing maniacs.  He's better than some writers - at least his madmen tend to have some sort of central delusion that forms the basis of their character - but they still seem rather forced, one-dimensional and just not very interesting. 

On the other hand, Kirkman's also toyed entertainingly with the Phoenix mythos, and written quite a good introduction for Cable.  A lot of the time, it works.  It's just not as consistent as it was under the previous writer, Brian Vaughan.

The latest issue was a particular mess, relying on a ludicrous shock tactic halfway through, and dredging up one of the most ill-advised ideas of the Silver Age in a way that makes me wonder whether Kirkman really knows what he's doing here.  This is a very inconsistent title which, frankly, needs to do something attention-grabbing if it wants to retain its A-list aura and not settle into the middle rankings.  If that's what Marvel want to do with this title, though, I'm not convinced the erratic Kirkman is necessarily the writer for the job.

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