THE CREATORS: Robert Kirkman writes.  Yanick Paquette is the notional regular artist up to issue #88 (with four fill-in issues by Ben Oliver and Pascal Alixe).  Then Salvador Larroca takes over.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2007: Professor X supposedly dies, Cyclops closes the school, Bishop sets up a rival X-Men team in Australia, they fight the Sentinels, and the Phoenix subplot rears its head again.  And then there's a tagged-on issue about the Shadow King.

Ultimate X-Men has spent most of the year in a lengthy and convoluted storyline in which the team disband, and then a whole new team forms in Australia. 

Robert Kirkman has clearly put a lot of effort into planning this arc, and in many ways the book is a welcome throwback to the days when an individual writer could tell an X-Men story all on his own, without being just a part of the larger picture.  There's planning, and direction, and structure.  It's all heading somewhere.  In that respect, it's all very admirable.

Yet there seems to be something missing.  I think the problem is that the plot has come to dominate the series at the expense of the characters.  Since the prime force appears to be Bishop, most of the characters are now just passengers in their own series.  This month's issue with Storm and the Shadow King stood out as an exception, but the most part, it doesn't feel as though the heroes are really driving their own series.

Another possibility is that Kirkman is falling into the trap of cobbling Ultimate X-Men together from bits and pieces of old X-Men stories.  He isn't re-telling any particular plot from the archives, but his story is a weird mish-mash of disparate elements - Xavier's death from the 1960s, the Australian era of the late 1980s, Bishop and Cable as enigmatic figures from the 1990s, and so on.  It doesn't seem like a very organic way of writing story, and it might explain why the story doesn't seem to be emerging from the characters.  That said, Kirkman has certainly managed to assemble these concepts into a coherent whole, which is a challenge in itself. 

To some extent, this sort of thing may be an inherent problem with the Ultimate imprint.  The books have certainly been flagging over the last couple of years, and their direct market sales are in decline.  The great hope to revive the line is reportedly Jeph Loeb, but the horrific Ultimates 3 #1 should have put paid to that idea.  Still, it does seem that some sort of big Ultimate Universe event is coming next year, in an attempt to breathe life into the line.  Kirkman is leaving when his storyline concludes in issue #93, and he's probably better off out of it.

In all fairness to Kirkman, while there's certainly room for improvement on this series, it remains a very readable, solid, traditional X-Men title - which is what it's there for, after all.  It's fine for what it is.  Still, the Ultimate imprint is now entering a phase where it needs to prove it still has a reason to exist.  2008 could be a make or break year for that imprint, and as matters stand, my money is on "break."

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