Back to the anniversary issues.  Ultimate X-Men also hits issue #50, and doesn't even go to the length of having "50th issue" printed on the front cover.  Mind you, the numbers are already pretty big on the Ultimate titles.

Anyway, this is the first part of "Cry Wolf."  Now, as I recall, this was originally planned to be the final Brian Vaughan storyline, before Bryan Singer And His Amazing Friends take over with the next arc.  Then again, with Singer off the movie franchise, one wonders whether that's still on the cards.  To be honest, I'm just enjoying Vaughan's run, and I'd kind of prefer to have him stick around.

The big sell for this storyline is that it's the return of Gambit.  Ultimate Gambit appeared before in a two-issue fill-in arc by Chuck Austen (which, by the way, was perfectly decent).  He was depicted as a kind of charmingly loveable homeless guy who helped out a lost girl.  I never really had a problem with that approach - at least it rid him of the Guilds, which have always struck me as more of a burden than a benefit.

This time round Gambit is the villain, something which is a bit of a stretch from his depiction in the previous arc.  Still, we'll have to see where Vaughan is going with this.  It makes a little more sense in the light of the mainstream character, who spent his first few years being portrayed as someone who was decidedly dodgy, and quite possibly a traitor to boot.

Gambit doesn't make his big entrance until near the end, though.  Up till then, it's a downtime soap opera issue, as the X-Men go to the fair.  Well, aside from Nightcrawler and the Angel, because they don't have image inducers in the Ultimate continuity.  Those two stay at home and play pirates, in a lovely little Danger Room sequence.

Everyone else, though, gets to head off to Coney Island, where much soap opera squabbling ensues.  It's a fun little issue, and Vaughan is juggling his storylines well.  I like the growing relationship between Storm and Wolverine, which is finally starting to put Wolverine into the "father figure" role he developed in the mainstream comics.  True, it takes a bit of the edge off him, but only because it's making him a more rounded character.  There's a slightly out-of-nowhere romantic triangle between Iceman, Rogue and Shadowcat, but with a great idea in there - while these stories usually focus on Rogue's angst, Vaughan suggests that her appeal to Iceman is that she's so completely unthreatening.  Because nothing can ever happen.  Literally.  That's a nice twist on the idea, and I don't think I've seen it before.

There's also a cameo by some sideshow freaks with gives us Ultimate versions of Wolfsbane, the Blob and... is that meant to be Puck?  It's hard to tell.  I'm not so sure about this scene - aside from providing some rather heavy-handed moralising, I doubt the wisdom of continuing to bring in existing characters for throwaway cameos.  Surely it's just going to lead to the same problems that Ultimate Marvel Team-Up caused, where it saddled the Ultimate Universe with interpretations that proved problematic when the time came to make proper use of the characters in question.  (Hulk and Iron Man, in particular, were introduced with back stories that had to be acknowledged and then almost immediately overwritten in Ultimates.)

But that aside, Vaughan's showing a real grasp of these characters, not to mention the team book dynamics - which are notoriously hard to pull off.  Can we keep him?  Please?

 Rating: A

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