Over in Ultimate X-Men, the Ultimate version of Emma Frost gets her proper introduction.

Ultimate Emma is the acceptable face of mutants - a character even more pacifist than Xavier.  She's all for Xavier's view of a world where humans and mutants live in harmony, but thinks the X-Men thing is a bit of a mistake.  Having mutants running around punching one another is not exactly going to set people's minds at ease.  So what Emma offers as a PR replacement for the X-Men is a bunch of mutants to whom the kids can relate, and who won't be doing much fighting at all.  People like Dazzler, a mutant rock star who will not be fighting crime in her spare time.  She'll just be a mutant rock star.

This is all actually quite interesting, on two levels.  For one thing, the idea plays nicely off the X-Men concept.  They're meant to be pacifists, they're meant to be out there pushing for their vision of a better world, and for some reason this means dressing up in costumes and fighting people.  There's always been an awkward tension between the requirements of the superhero genre and what the X-Men are actually supposed to be trying to achieve, which has been one of the things Grant Morrison's been playing off.  Emma's idea of a completely non-combatant X-Men actually makes a degree of sense, in this light.

Separately, Bendis is also playing off the fact that Emma is a character whose goals are obviously suspect because of what we know of the original character.  Bendis neatly raises suspicions further by having Emma claim that her only power is crystal skin.  Is she lying, or is Ultimate Emma genuinely different?  We've only got her own word for it, and we're hardly going to trust her.  It's one of those interesting areas where the character's existence in a prior incarnation unavoidably affects how you read the story, and Bendis subtly plays off that to add dimensions without doing anything that would confuse readers unfamiliar with her.

Bendis continues to wheel out new characters, with references to Wolfsbane, Bishop, Blink, Callisto and - most importantly for purposes of this book - Havok and Polaris.  Most of these are just throwaways, but Havok in particular is clearly coming to the plot soon.

But Bendis doesn't seem to be leaving much time to deal with all of these plots he's introduced.  He's only got two more issues to go before Reload.  After that we're getting a fill-in arc by Brian Vaughan, followed by a shameless piece of attention-grabbing with Bryan Singer Presents Two People You've Never Heard Of.  There are lots of good ideas being thrown out here that could keep Ultimate X-Men in plots for years to come.  Vaughan has indicated that he'll be doing something based on fallout from Bendis' stories; it'd be disappointing, to put it mildly, if the Singer issues threw all of this away in favour of some kind of film tie-in.

I may be a little premature in having these concerns.  But with two relatively short, finite runs coming up, I can't escape my worries about the future direction of the title - specifically, whether it's actually going to have one.  Still, this is all good stuff.  It's just a shame Bendis isn't sticking around longer.

Rating: A

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