Ah, reverse psychology.

Mark Millar has spent the last few issues of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate War dropping hints that Wolverine deliberately left Cyclops to die in the Savage Land, so as to give himself a free run at Jean Grey when he got back to America.  And I've basically taken those as the usual attempts to set up suspicions within the team and build tension.

But this issue Millar takes the storyline in a direction I honestly wasn't expecting.  All the hints were correct, and Wolverine did in fact leave Cyclops to die in the Savage Land.  Seems odd to say that I didn't see a plot development coming despite characters talking about it for three issues running, but like I say, it's reverse psychology.  You just don't expect the heroes to wander around murdering one another.

Of course, Millar's Wolverine started off as a villain, so it's not as drastically out of character here as it would be for the mainstream version of the character.  If anything, it's a handy reminder that we're dealing here with a seriously unpleasant version of Wolverine.

I like it when writers surprise me.  This gets a good review.

The actual story consists largely of Cyclops lying in a pile at the bottom of a pit and trying not to die.  An entire issue in Scott's company is not in most circumstances the most attractive of prospects, given that he's hardly the most dynamic personality in the world - he's a team book character who works in that context but usually seems a little flat on his own.  But Millar makes this issue work, as poor Scott spends the issue trying not to starve to death and realising that he has made a serious miscalculation as to just how much Wolverine hates him.  Scott has spent the last couple of years assuming that he was having a romantic triangle subplot with another basically reasonable chap, and it's come as a bit of a shock that Wolverine seems to have been thinking along drastically different lines.

It's not a perfect issue - the art rather overplays the whole "lying in a heap" idea and ends up making Scott look more like a dropped rubber chicken than an injured man.  I can see what it's aiming for, but it overshoots the mark.  Nonetheless, this is one of Millar's best - a lovely piece of misdirection.

Rating: A

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