Brian Bendis takes over on Ultimate X-Men this week.  Since he's already writing Ultimate Spider-Man, that pretty much means that the direction of the imprint is going to be determined by his writing for the moment.  Ultimates only comes out a few times a year, and let's be honest, nobody's paying attention to Ultimate Adventures any more.  (No, it's not finished, before you ask.)

To state the obvious, Bendis is a very different writer from Mark Millar.  His stories tend to be much more oriented around character drama, whereas Millar is more of a high concept, action writer.  Also, with some notable exceptions, Bendis' revamps of characters for the Ultimate imprint have tended to stay relatively close to the originals.  He sticks to the original idea, where Millar's reinventions tend to be much more drastic (often to the point where you wondered why he didn't just create a new character altogether).

However, we're not going to find out how Bendis deals with some of the more drastic Millar revamps just yet, because this is actually  Wolverine and Spider-Man team-up.  Plenty of people have already commented that it reads more like an issue of Ultimate Spider-Man than Ultimate X-Men, and they're right.  Of course, Bendis and Millar are so different that the change of style was always going to be drastic, but this goes further than that.  It's not just a Bendis story; to all intents and purposes, it really is an Ultimate Spider-Man story, even down to first person narration from Peter Parker.

Which is fine by me; Ultimate Spider-Man is a great little book, and I'm more than happy to see more of it.  This is a fairly typical Bendis blend of action of character, as Wolverine takes refuge at Peter's house after being gunned down in the first scene.  There's enough action in it to keep the kids happy, but the story's really built around Peter and Mary Jane's reactions to Wolverine, a character who comes from a much less innocent side of their world.

David Finch's art is a pleasant surprise.  He was the artist on Call of Duty: The Brotherhood, which had its moments but tended to some heavily idealised characters that detracted from the supposed "real-world" approach.  (Plus, his storytelling wasn't helped by the almost impossible remit of doing clear scenes where half the characters were wearing identical firemen's uniforms that made it impossible to tell them apart.)  This is much better work, however.  Partly that's because his style is more suited to the material, but he does a great Wolverine, and his style really clicks with Bendis' pacing.

It's a real change of pace from the Millar run, but that was the only sensible way to go.  There's a lot of validity to the complaints that Bendis has just copied the formula that worked on Spider-Man, but it's a formula that really does work.

Rating: A

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