Ultimate X-Men #72

Written by Robert Kirkman

Pencils & Cover by Tom Raney

 

I’m starting to see where Kirkman is going with his new pet character, Magician. Two battles now, another implied, have ended with Magician himself coming out as the hero while the rest of the X-Men are left unconscious. He’s only getting cockier with less and less care for those around him, soon to become a detriment to the rest of the team. It’s also been hinted at that he starts most of the problems he solves just so that he’ll have more chances to look like the best. He might have even staged the ‘accident’ that put him on the team in the first place as the surprise ending suggests. This is all what I would hope for with a character as powerful as Magician, whose powers become a cope-out for lazy writers.

 

Kirkman has decided to eschew the trend of writing for the trades that this book had previously stuck to pretty religiously. Things flow more from one story into the next with less clear breaks and with lots of unconnected plots are going at the same time. Jean for instance, is being locked up by Professor X for fear of her ‘other,’ dark personality coming out again. The little goblins we saw last time are still around, and it appears that her mind might be using the goblins as an explanation for her telekinesis. She thinks they’re doing it when it’s really just her own powers.

 

Finally, we have the growing Kurt problem, who has only gone farther into self-exile. He feels betrayed by Peter because Peter’s gay and he’s fallen into a deep infatuation with Alison, who’s been in a coma. With Warren spying on Emma’s school, and by the looks of the next issue’s cover, he might be spilling out his little blue heart to her next issue. I’m not sure where Kirkman plans to take this, the cast is huge now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nightcrawler ended up leaving the team to give other characters more panel space.

 

Raney on pencils and Scott Hanna on inks have really come into their own. Not that their previous work on this book was bad, but the panels now are consistently magnificent. You can really see the change in characters like Kitty and Rogue who’ve lost that extreme upside down pear shaped head for something a bit more natural looking. And it goes without saying that the large splash pages are masterfully done, even if they are all a bit too posed (that is the tone of the book though).

 

The dialogue on the other hand is the one disappointment. It’s mainly with the fight banter during the X-Men’s romp with ‘fill-in-the-blank mutant hating group of the month.’ It’s a large amount of filling in and talking that slows down the ‘feel’ of the action. It is a necessary evil when you have so many other plots going on, that the characters are left explaining the situation for us rather than actually showing us why they’re fighting. It’s nothing to ruin the book’s rating, but worth mentioning.

 

In the back of the book is a second installment of the Masked Marvel (a series of back-up stories), worth mentioning only for its awfulness. It is a self-aware story to the point of nausea, being a story about comic book writers in the Marvel Universe. While I must admit that some interesting ideas were used to explain that comic books in the MarvelU are really like gossip rags, such an idea would be most amusing as a small aside in another unrelated story.

 

All this could be overlooked if the dialogue wasn’t dross I wouldn’t force prisoners to read through, and Kesel (the writer) seems to have no handle on Wolverine’s personality. I understand the absurdity of Logan jumping out of the bushes could be funny, but it is played straight here.

 

The actual superhero’s design isn’t that bad, with a nice costume and cool power effect, but the comic writing scenes feel as narcissistic as you can get. The continued explanations that the writer should ‘write what he knows’ sounds more like a lame apology for not being able to come up with a better story. I’m officially putting my vote down for a NEA on this comic idea.

 

Rating - 8