Robert Kirkman ties up his Magician storyline - well, sort of - with Ultimate X-Men #74.

Of course, thanks to some very awkward scheduling, we already know more or less what happens in this final chapter, because they blew the ending a fortnight ago in Ultimate X-Men Annual #2.  In fairness, there's slightly more to it than previously revealed, but nothing that really chances the point.  This isn't a late running title - Marvel just gratuitously blew the ending of the story for no apparent reason, rather than hold back the annual for a fortnight.  They're normally so good about this sort of thing, too.  I can't begin to fathom their logic.

For months now, Kirkman has been building up the Magician, and presenting him as an irritating little pet character.  The three-part "Magical" contains the payoff - Magician is just rewriting reality around him to suit his fantasies, and since he fancies being the coolest character in the book, that's what he becomes.  The X-Men duly fight him and, as the annual revealed, Wolverine kills him fairly quickly.  The twist here is that he isn't really dead, but he just turns up at the end to announce that he's going off to think about things.

All of this is a potentially interesting idea.  But when all is said and done, it doesn't work.  The fundamental problem is that Elliot simply hasn't been thought through as a character.  He has no personality, beyond what's immediately necessary for the scene to work.  He's either confused, or calmly heroic, or a madman, depending on which scene we're reading.  But for this story to work we need to buy into the idea that he truly dreams of being on the team.  Unless we believe in his desires and can sense that there's a coherent character motivating all this, it just becomes a load of random nonsense happening.  And Elliot isn't a strong enough character, because there's nothing there underneath the superficial concept.  He's an idea for a plot device, not a human being.

Tom Raney and Scott Hanna continue to do a solid job on the art, and there's some reasonably interesting material in the subplots (even though a couple of pages are cheerfully wasted setting up the Ultimate X-Men Annual from a fortnight ago).  The closing scene with Magician showing up to explain the plot to a helpless Kitty Pryde at least manages to be slightly creepy. 

Individually, most scenes work just fine.  But they don't hang together as a whole, because Elliot is ultimately just a gaping hole where the emotional core of the story ought to be.  Disappointing, because Kirkman can do better, and the concept isn't a bad one.

Rating: C+

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