Ultimate X-Men concludes the two-part "Shock & Awe", with the introduction of Ultimate Lady Deathstrike.

It's a fairly slight story, mainly designed to get Storm and Wolverine back to the team for future stories.  Still, Vaughan's take on Deathstrike is pretty good, and he's solved the problem of getting Weapon X back into circulation without undermining the end of Mark Millar's original storyline.

Millar's version of Weapon X was ridiculously over the top, in much the way you'd expect from him.  Vaughan tones it down a bit.  We're left here with Dr Cornelius, usually a fairly low-rent villain, leading a bunch of commandos.  Since Cornelius is obviously telling everyone what they want to hear to keep them on side, it's slightly ambiguous quite what his motivations are.  He gives us two possibilities: he wants to carry on Weapon X's work, or he's just trying to take care of loose ends by killing Wolverine before Wolverine kills him.  Of course, it could be both, and Vaughan sells the character quite effectively as a bland but slightly inscrutable villain.

As for Lady Deathstrike, she's a character who really needed a streamlining for the Ultimate continuity, and that's what she gets.  The original version is, shall we say, a bit more complicated than she needs to be for storyline purposes.  She's the daughter of an obscure Daredevil villain whose procedure for bonding adamantium to skeletons was used on Bullseye.  She thinks Wolverine must have stolen the procedure, and wants revenge on him.  And, just to complicate matters, she's been turned into a cyborg by Spiral, who happened to be passing.

This version gets a drastic overhaul, positioning her as a hybrid of the original character and Yukio.  She's now a thief who wants revenge on Storm, and who gets her cyborg upgrade from the remnants of Weapon X in order to let her do that.  From their point of view, she's really there to take out Wolverine.  From hers, Wolverine is just in her way.  It does mean that, for future purposes, this Deathstrike appears to be a Storm villain rather than a Wolverine villain - but that's good enough when there's only one Utlimate X-book.

It's largely an action issue, and Stuart Immonen makes the best of it with some great battle sequences.  It's good dynamic stuff, full of energy and movement. A fun issue, succeeding on its intended level.

 Rating: A

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