Ultimate X-Men seems to be losing the plot in a big way.

Issue #78 is the concluding part of "Cable", a convoluted time travel storyline that serves mainly to introduce Ultimate Cable and Ultimate Bishop.  The big twist is that this version of Cable turns out to be a future version of Wolverine, thus laying the groundwork for some poor sod in the legal department to spend hours of his life trying to figure out who gets the royalty cheque if the character takes off.

I really have no idea what point Kirkman was trying to make with this storyline, if anything.  The closest it comes to an emotional core is the idea of Cyclops losing his cool when Jean Grey is in danger.  Not a bad idea, but somehow Kirkman has managed to write it in a way that makes the character far less interesting.  One of the things that makes Cyclops distinctive is the fact that he's a very controlled, uptight character who keeps his emotions firmly in check.  So you might think that having him lose it over Jean, and turn on Xavier over it, was a good idea because it demonstrated the strength of his feelings for Jean.  But that's not how Kirkman writes it - he doesn't really seem to get Scott's character, and ends up just writing him as generically angry and upset.  It doesn't work.

Otherwise, this final issue features a bunch of random fighting with, of all people, the Ultimate Six Pack - because we were just begging to see Grizzly reinvented, weren't we?  There's a teased death for the second time in as many issues, and a big finale where we're supposed to think Xavier's dead.  He won't be, of course, and in fairness, this title hasn't done "the X-Men without their leader" before.  It's not an unpromising direction.  But we've taken a terribly uninspired route to get there.

The overall impression from this arc is of a writer who doesn't really know what he's trying to do with this book, and who has resorted to stringing together some gimmicks in a reasonably coherent fashion while he tries to figure something out.  It's an entirely serviceable and professional effort, but it still feels as though it's going through the motions of a story assembled from stock parts.  Compared to something like Ant-Man - which, whatever else you think of it, has a ton of verve and commitment to its premise of a complete bastard superhero - this feels utterly routine and uninspired.

Too professionally competent to really call bad, and Ben Oliver is doing perfectly fine work on the art.  But Kirkman is capable of far better than this.

Rating: B-

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