Books
1 & 2: Mark Millar,
Adam & Andy Kubert, & Art Thibert
Ultimate X-Men is turning out to be almost
as good as Ultimate Spider-Man. As someone who had never read
the X-Men books, I found the stories complex and intelligent
but easy to follow. Millar has always been one of favorite writers, though
unfortunately I had only ever happened upon his work occasionally. This
is his first extended series I've read. He does a good job of extracting
the coolest parts of the X-Men sagas and leaving out all of the dead-ends
that hundreds of authors have experiemented with over the years. In fact,
you could look upon the Ultimates line as trying to retell the
classic stories not just to be fresh and energetic, but to get them perfect
- like doing hundreds of sketches of a model before realizing what is
needed to do one perfect portrait.
But the series falls short of being a definitively
perfect version of the X-Men. The art here is very good, and consistent,
but not exemplary. The character redesigns are all done well. The stories
focus on the interplay between characters, but since this is by far the
most interesting aspect of the series, I found myself wishing for even
more. There are many, many characters, so some are necessarily not as
fleshed out as others. The introduction of Nick Fury was very cool, but
I think the Weapon X storyline went on too long and I didn't like the
stereotypical military nemesis. Some other plotholes included the infiltrator
Wolverine suddenly deciding to honestly stay with the group without any
reason or reflection; and the government launching machines that attempted
to destroy the X-Men but destroyed Times Square instead - as is too common
in comics and movies, no one seemed to comment afterwards that this would
have been a horrible tragedy. Some parts of the stories seemed to move
too fast, and though there was less prior X-Men knowledge needed than
I expected, it did feel that some characters were not developed well
because we were supposed to already know their personalities. But it's
alwas a difficult task to juggle all of these superheroes and villians,
so Millar generally does a good job.
This comic handles everything much better than my other
X-Men experience, last year's movie - better dialogue, fuller characters,
more action, plot twists and humor. I'm going to stick around and keep
buying the collected graphic novel collections.
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