The Ultimate imprint is in the middle of the Ultimate War miniseries at the moment, which has the Ultimate X-Men team tied up for the moment.  Rather than complicate matters with (shudder) a crossover, Mark Millar goes off in a different direction.  And so Ultimate X-Men #26 is a series of flashbacks fleshing out the history between Millar's versions of Xavier and Magneto.

There are some good moments in here - Xavier's unnervingly distant attitude on leaving his family, and a rare sighting of an anti-mutant lynch mob who are actually given a good, sound rationale for wanting to kill their victim.  Guest artists Ben and Ray Lai are totally unknown to me, but they do a decent job, in a superior mid-to-late-nineties sort of a way.

This story isn't meant to fill in all of the background between Xavier and Magneto, simply to chart the breakdown in their relationship.  So we don't get to find out how they met, and we get some interesting references that Magneto comes from a rich family who funded their activities in this universe.  Of course, tying Magneto's origin to World War II is troublesome in 2002 - it requires the character to be coming up for retirement, and Millar is writing him younger than that.  But this reference seems to dispose of the entire "concentration camp" back story which gives the original character his prime motivation.  It's a good story, and one which rightly held its place in the movie version.  Millar replaces it with... well, with nothing, really.  There's some suggestion that some of his family got killed somewhere along the line, and a schism with the survivors, but nothing very informative.

Here's the problem with this story, and the reason it doesn't work.  We're given a series of scenes over a period of years each of which illustrates the state of Xavier and Magneto's relationship at that point.  As matters go on, Magneto becomes more and more extreme, and ultimately Xavier is forced to turn on him.  But Millar gives no real indication of what motivates Magneto here, or of why 90% of the mutants living in their city would follow him on a scheme of world conquest - scarcely credible.

We're given plenty of Magneto's opinions, but nothing to justify or explain his actions beyond some vague chatter about mutants being oppressed by humans.  Yet we never see any illustration of Magneto being harrassed, and if anything, by ruling out the character's Claremont-era origin story that made him a three-dimensional character, Millar makes his version flatter than ever.  There may well be some justification for the way this character acts, but Millar has given us no clue what it might be, and that leaves us to relate to him only as the rather dull Silver Age villain he started out as.

As a result, it's a bit of a step backwards, as Millar succeeds in erasing the rub of three-dimensionality which his Magneto had acquired from earlier stories.

Rating: B-

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