There's a rumour going round that Ultimate X-Men is set to be cancelled as part of a shake-up of the Ultimate imprint.  Now, I have no idea whether this is true or not.  But as with so many rumours, the fact that it's so plausible is telling in its own right.

Ultimate X-Men isn't selling badly, but nor is it doing particularly well.  At the moment, as best as anyone can tell, the book sells around 60,000 copies a month in the North American direct market.   In absolute terms, that's pretty decent.  But the book seems to be stuck in a chronic long-term decline.  For the first four years or so, it was a consistently big seller.  Now it's a mid-table book, and it's shed 25% of its readers in the last two years.  That's not so good.

Nor is this specific to Ultimate X-Men.  The whole Ultimate imprint is in a bit of a malaise.  Ultimate Fantastic Four is down around 40% year on year, and now sells below Omega Flight (in the direct market, at least).  The Ultimate Power miniseries, which was supposed to be a big deal, has fizzled.  The Ultimate Vision miniseries, which was supposed to capitalise on Warren Ellis's Ultimate Galactus Trilogy, has swandived gracefully into sales oblivion.

Marvel have been at pains to stress that the Ultimate imprint still does rather well for them outside the direct market.  And in absolute terms, it's not doing so badly inside the direct market either.  But clearly there's a problem here.  There's a distinct lack of buzz around all the books.  While most imprints could get by quite happily at these sales levels, the Ultimate books are meant to be a much bigger deal.  Why does the world need an Ultimate X-Men book that sells 25% lower than Uncanny X-Men?  What's it for?  The answer might be found in huge sales outside the direct market, but it's hard to imagine why Robert Kirkman and Yanick Paquette's stories would be doing that well with the wider audience.  Bluntly, Ultimate X-Men and most of its Ultimate stablemates are starting to feel like inertia titles - books that have served their purpose, but sell too well to axe.

In fairness, Robert Kirkman's Ultimate X-Men does have a clear direction.  He obviously has a long-term plot in mind.  But the direction he's chosen is a weird one.  Xavier has died (at least as far as the X-Men know), and Scott has decided to close down the team in favour of running a normal, straightforward school.  This leads the time-traveller Bishop to found a rival X-Men team based in Australia.  In amongst all this, we also have some new Sentinels, and the Ultimate Mutant Liberation Front.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with any of this at the conceptual level, but it begs the question: what is the Ultimate imprint for?  Ostensibly, it's there to be a streamlined, cleaner, more accessible version of the Marvel Universe.  So why is Ultimate X-Men telling a complicated story like this, which drags the X-Men quite some distance from their iconic set-up?  In fact, one of the strengths of this book has been its ability to write the X-Men as an old-fashioned superhero team rather than worrying about multiple squads running around all over the place. 

But here, we have Kirkman cobbling together a Frankenstein story from the backwaters of X-Men continuity.  We've got the Australian era, which lasted for a few years in the late 1980s and is pretty much a footnote so far as today's readers are concerned.  We've got Xavier dying and Scott breaking up the team, which was a catastrophically unsuccessful storyline from 1969.  We've got reinventions of obscure villains like Fenris and Zero.

None of these things are bad, individually, but when you stand back and take a look at the whole book, you have to ask - why?  How is any of this delivering what Ultimate X-Men was meant to deliver?  Do Marvel even still have a clear idea of what Ultimate X-Men is for?

Perhaps they do, if they're truly willing to prune the imprint back so severely.  In fact, if the aim is to be iconic, perhaps the mistake was to build the Ultimate imprint around ongoing titles, rather than miniseries and maxiseries, in the first place.  The format of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Ultimates may be a better bet.

Leaving aside the bigger picture, though, is the book any good on its own terms?  Well, it's alright.  It passes two of the crucial tests - the characters are strongly defined with individual voices, and Kirkman unquestionably has a plan in mind.  I have faith that he knows where he's going with this.  Where we part company is that I'm not convinced that it's going to be that interesting.  The recycling of old characters with fairly arbitrary changes gives the impression that Kirkman isn't trying to get back to the strong core ideas of the characters; he's really just playing a "reinvent an obscure X-Men villain" parlour game.  That's the trap of the Ultimate imprint, and Kirkman may be hurling himself into it.

Yanick Paquette is a sound artist, but not an exceptional one.  His work is clean and readable enough, but there are clumsy bits that let it down - a poor action sequence with Bishop levitating Sentinels, and an awkward section with Phoenix and Jean where he's too busy doing T&A to sell the emotion or the drama.  I've seen much better from Paquette in the past, mind you, and I can only assume he's having an off month.

Overall, at least there's an agenda of some sort, and it seems to be on a slow build to something.  It's fine so far as it goes.  But it isn't an especially gripping storyline, and if Marvel don't see a future for this book in a streamlined Ultimate imprint, well, it's easy to see why they might feel that way. 

Rating: B

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