Thanks to Marvel's incredible stop-start scheduling, we're down to two X-books again this week.  First up is Ultimate X-Men #41, which is nominally part 2 of "New Mutants."

In fact, it looks like "New Mutants" isn't a storyline at all.  It would seem to be a series of short stories around the common theme of introducing new characters.  While I'm all for self-contained arcs, I really wish Marvel would stop labelling groups of issues as storylines when they're nothing of the sort.  We've been seeing an increasing tendency to arbitrarily label a set of issues as a "storyline" when it really just denotes the proposed break point for the trade paperbacks.  Interesting though that is, from the point of view of the reader, it just creates needless confusion.

Anyway, this is a self-contained story about a kid with the unfortunate mutant power to kill everyone near him - whether he likes it or not.  Thanks to his healing factor, Wolverine is immune, and gets the happy task of breaking the good news to him: not only is he not joining the X-Men, he's simply too dangerous to live.

Bendis retains some of the cynicism that was always present under Mark Millar.  The X-Men's problem with this kid isn't so much that he's got uncontrollable powers - if they were in classic hero mode, they'd just get Wolverine to ferry him food until somebody was able to build him a containment suit or something like that.  Their concern is more that, in the case of mutants like this, the public paranoia is entirely justified.  Therefore, they must be expunged from the public record as far as humanly possible, for the greater good.

Eminently logical, but not particularly heroic.  Bendis pulls it off by convincing us that the kid has no real desire to stick around either, and that Wolverine is simply putting him out of his misery.  Still, it adds a little more shadow to the straightforward central idea by flagging up the fact that the Ultimate version of the X-Men are much more concerned with the political implications of their actions.  As they should be - after all, persuading the world of their political views is supposed to be the point of the exercise.  But it takes them - or at least Wolverine - into highly ambiguous moral territory.

It's nicely paced, and a good execution of a simple concept. 

Rating: A-

back | continue