Y'know, I don't get it. The Phoenix storyline is Jean Grey's big moment, but in the collected editions of Ultimate X-Men, the emergence of this fiery familiar still boasts Wolverine cover art. Don't the decision-makers at Marvel think other characters will sell?

The story in this volume is varied, as is the art. Two of the five issues collected here are drawn by Kaare Andrews, whose balloony style seems more appropriate to the Cartoon Network than Marvel Comics. Adam Kubert's bold, distinctive style in the other three issues is much preferable.

As for the stories themselves, you've got a mixed bag to read and enjoy. Kitty Pryde, the intangible mutant, makes her debut after sinking through her parents' kitchen floor and right into the downstairs neighbor's secret affair. Cyclops and Wolverine have girl issues to work out, violently -- a problem Professor X attempts to quell by sending them off to the Savage Land to confront dinosaurs and smart robots. Iceman's parents are still trying to sue the X-Men for "breaking" their son in battle. And the Beast, still reeling from a breakup with Storm, finds hopeful new romance with a young mutant model in an Internet chatroom.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Mutants, lacking Magneto's strong leadership, is becoming a hangout for ambitious anthropomorphic activists. The Blob, it turns out, likes posing in Internet chatrooms as a young, skinny, female model.

And Jean Grey starts having visions of fire.

The last chapter of this book is the best, with the Hellfire Club coming out of the closet, announcing its sponsorship of Xavier's endeavors in a secret effort to tame the coming Phoenix. Suffice it to say, this is not the same Hellfire Club that bedeviled the X-Men in the mainstream Marvel universe.

That's a lot of story to swallow, and the Ultimate team might be lauded for squeezing so much plot into so few pages. Unfortunately, there are problems, not the least of which is Andrews' distracting art. The writing is intelligent, but the visuals are more likely to attract a grade-school audience. The watered-down power of the Hellfire Club is disappointing, too, and the chatroom "gag" drags on far too long. Most importantly, the pivotal Dark Phoenix storyline gets lukewarm attention; while I'm sure the subject will surface again, this was a disappointing debut.

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
3 March 2007