Ultimate X-Men reaches its seventy-fifth issue, an impressive number in this day and age.  By now, the Ultimate imprint has settled into the landscape and the books have become less major events.  But the imprint still has a lot going for it.

For one thing, unlike the X-books, Marvel have actually protected the Ultimate brand.  They've kept new titles to a minimum and made sure to load them with major creators.  Because of that, they can get away with less prominent creators on books like this and Ultimate Fantastic Four.  Also, unlike all the other X-Men writers, Robert Kirkman really is free to pursue his own path.  He can write a team book without having to compromise for other writer's plots, and without having two other teams wandering around the mansion. 

Of all the X-Men titles, this is the one that most closely resembles the X-Men's 1980s heyday.  Kirkman's actual stories have been a little hit and miss, true, but this title still has far and away the most likeable set-up, untainted by the commercial demand for extra titles.

This issue introduces Ultimate Cable.  He's the sort of character who could potentially benefit enormously from an Ultimate Universe reboot.  Over the years, several writers have found plenty of potential in Cable.  The character can be made to work.  But he's weighed down with a back story so convoluted that you need a degree and a flipchart to make sense of it.  Although some writers have managed to work around it, it's still a whopping great obstacle at the centre of the character.  Virtually no good stories have been told by actually addressing it head on, and that indicates a real problem.  In the Ultimate continuity, he gets a second chance.  They can construct a back story that works to support the character instead of obstructing him.

Whether Kirkman is actually going to do that or not is open to question.  He's certainly building this version of Cable around the key points that made the character work in the first place - he's a cyborg, he kicks ass, and he's generally just cool.  It's a back to basics approach.  And then he goes and hints at an all-new back story which is... well, certainly intriguing on one level, but also seems like it would just replace one can of worms with another one.  Hopefully it's just a feint. 

Giving Kirkman the benefit of the doubt on that point, it's a good introduction to the character.  On art, the underrated Ben Oliver continues to produce some good clean, straightforward work.  It's not got the effortless style that Stuart Immonen brought to the book during his run, but it still has many of the same virtues.  I'm all for artists who are more interested in telling the story than making themselves look cool.

In a back-up strip, Sean McKeever and Mark Brooks make the first serious attempt to do something with the Ultimate universe's version of Cypher.  We've seen him before as a character at Emma Frost's rival school, but really he's not been much more than a background figure.

The idea here is that Doug isn't even a mutant in this world, although he's still a languages genius.  Within Emma's school, he's still an outsider looking in, and his attempts to be one of the ground just end up getting him into danger and alienating the others.

I'm not quite sure about this one.  Making him a normal human who's just very good at languages seems to miss the point - Cypher was an outright mutant who was absolutely useless in a fight, and therefore didn't fit into either the human or mutant camps.  If he's just a talented human then you're changing the dynamic, and I'm not convinced it's any more interesting.  It's also a very strangely paced story; the finish seems bizarrely abrupt.

Still, it's a fun lead story, and the back-up is at least interesting.  A good anniversary issue.

Rating: B+

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