For some time now, Ultimate X-Men seems to have been drifting slowly off my mental radar.  It just doesn't cross my mind very often, except when it shows up on the shelves once a month, and reminds me that it's still around.

Not that it's a bad book, mind you.  Robert Kirkman is a capable superhero writer.  He's perfectly able to take a collection of established concepts, string them together in a new order, and make them hang together as a story.  It's a very polished effort, and arguably one of Marvel's better team books in that regard.  Kirkman clearly understands the fundamentals of this format.

Equally, you could do a lot worse than artist Yanick Paquette.  His work is clear, attractive, and easily readable.  His women have an unfortunate tendency to pose for the camera when they ought to be acting, but otherwise, he's a good fit for the book.

And yet, and yet...

Notionally, issue #88 is the epilogue to "Sentinels".  In reality, it's nothing of the sort.  It's a transition issue which serves mainly as the prologue to the next arc.  Stories like this used to fit quite happily between storylines back in the 1980s, and there's nothing wrong with them.  Nor do they pose major problems for the trade paperback collection, because you can shove them at the back of a volume and they'll fit just fine.  In fact, they even provide a handy advert for the next volume.  What bemuses me is Marvel's insistence on claiming that they're actually part of the main story, when they clearly aren't.  It just leaves the readers expecting something else, which isn't helpful.

That's a side issue, though.  I think my main problem with this book is that Kirkman seems to be approaching it as a rather clinical chess game.  He has a complex and detailed over-reaching storyline, and there's nothing wrong with that.  It's carefully constructed and it makes sense.  Yet the series seems to be driven by the plot rather than by the characters.  The cast aren't being bent out of shape to fit the demands of the plot, but there's a slight feeling that they're merely being dragged along for the ride.  I don't get the feeling that the characters and their choices affect the events all that much, one way or the other.  And that's not ideal, dramatically speaking.

Still, I don't want to be too harsh about this series.  It's a slick, professional job, and it's clearly had a lot of thought put into it.  There's just that little something missing that makes it a good book, rather than a great one.

Rating: B

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