Showing posts with label mahmud asrar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mahmud asrar. Show all posts

Sunday, November 06, 2016

Review: All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 2: Family Business

This second collection of the Mark Waid-written A-title of the Avengers franchise contains six issues and an out-of-order interruption from a Free Comic Book Day giveaway, and it takes a while to get going, as the first two issues are tie-ins to the "Standoff" crossover storyline. These first two issues, both drawn by Adam Kubert, don't quite work on their own, particularly as the second of these ends with Winter Solider and the Captain Americas Captains America rallying all of the various Avengers teams for a big battle that...happens elsewhere.

If you're a trade-reader and have already read Avengers: Standoff, then you can skip these two issues here. If you haven't yet read Avengers: Standoff and want to know the specifics of what's going on and how it gets revolved, you'll want to read Standoff.

That's followed immediately by a short story drawn by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer in which the All-New, All-Different Wasp narrates her infiltration of The Vision's body and her planting of bombs within it, which blows him up; it originally appeared in Free Comic Book Day 2016 [Civil War II] #1.

And then the volume starts for real and, yeah, 50 pages or so into a 140-ish page collection isn't the ideal place for a story to start for real. Mahmud Asrar takes over the art chores for the rest of the book.

The Vision starts malfunctioning very strangely, attacking the other Avengers in their hangar base, and then a new Wasp shows up, helping them deal with The Vision problem...which we already read about, as that what was happening in the Alan Davis-drawn short (an asterisk in the bottom of a panel of the issue refers readers to the FCBD special). This new Wasp is Nadia Pym, daughter of the currently dead Hank Pym and his late first wife, who was being raised by bad Russians and used her knowledge of Pym particles to escape, break into her late father's lab and build herself a Wasp suit.

Given that there are now two Captains America, Spider-Men, Hawkeyes, Hulks, Thors and Iron Men, it's not so unusual that Marvel would introduce a second Wasp, although it is somewhat unusual that a) The original Wasp is still around, in full possession of her powers and still actively super heroing, and b) As the daughter of Pym and his Silver Age wife, Nadia is a white-skinned woman of European descent, just as Janet Van Dyne is; in every other case of Marvel introducing a second version of a character it was to bring some diversity to their universe, either in terms of race or gender or both.

Because of that, I have to assume Waid (or someone else) has longer-term plot reasons for introducing a new, second Wasp...unless Marvel Comics just wanted to have a daughter of Hank Pym be their current Wasp, in order to more closely reflect the status quo of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but if that's the case Nadia is pretty different than Ant-Man's Hope Van Dyne in a couple ways. Starting with her name.

Jarvis, who is particularly sensitive about Janet Van Dyne's legacy, decides to take Nadia to meet her namesake and kinda sorta but not really step-mom Janet, and the pair hang out together. Meanwhile, the rest of these Avengers all go out into outer space in order to help Nova look for his father. They don't find him, but they do find a curious space trap that embroils them in a battle with a particularly formidable classic Marvel villain. Waid uses a pair of items from Marvel lore in a rather inventive way to have our heroes triumph over him.

All in all, it's a pretty messy package, and not one that is particularly well-suited to casual, trade-only readers. Of course, if you missed the single issues, there isn't really any other way to read it.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Review: All-New X-Men Vol. 7: The Utopians

Imagine a big, red stick of dynamite the size of a grain solo, with an incredibly, almost unbelievably long fuse. Imagine someone lighting that fuse, and then imagine watching as the spark traveled slowly down the fuse over the course of, say, two and a half years. Then imagine the spark finally reaching the end of the fuse, disappearing as it came into contact with the impossibly large explosive and...nothing at all happening.

That should give you a pretty good idea of how Brian Michael Bendis concluded his 41-issue run on All-New X-Men, the last five mismatched issues of which are collected in the poorly-named All-New X-Men Vol. 7: The Utopians.

To say it fizzled at the end wouldn't even be accurate, as fizzling is something happening. Rather, Bendis' run just ends. To keep casting about for metaphors, his All-New X-Men wasn't a journey of any kind. Sure, the starting point might have been rather compelling, and yes, there was a great deal of movement, but there was apparently never destination in mind–Bendis just packed up his characters and readers and started driving in a particular direction until the car ran out of gas.

I honestly don't know how typical this is of Bendis' long-form comics writing, as I didn't make it to the end of his much longer tenure on the Avengers franchise or Ultimate Spider-Man, driven away from both by the price increases and constant rebooting that has made it difficult to find where I left off (His Ultimate Spider-Man run had at least three different titles and relaunches, for example; I would need a list of reading order and a lot of patience to find all those trades and read them...and that would be if I skipped all the Ultimate "event" comics, like that series where Marvel Universe Peter Parker first met Ultimate Universe Miles Morales).

This is particularly frustrating in the case of All-New X-Men, as the title launched with one of those big violations of the status quo that really doesn't seem as if it can or should last forever: After the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, in which Cyclops and a handful of other mutants possessed or were possessed by the Phoenix Force and essentially went crazy and conquered the world for a while, a dying Beast used a time machine to bring the original, teenage X-Men to the present in order to remind Cyclops of who he (and they) used to be. But then they decided to stay in the present rather than go back and live their miserable lives full of death, horror and loss.

Such time-travel has been done on a temporary basis before, and this read an awful lot like a reversal of what DC did with Legion of Super-Hero characters a couple of times, but in the context of X-Men comics, it was was kind of clever, since the modern team travels to or otherwise interacts with nightmarish dystopian futures on a pretty regular basis (the twist here being that the nigmarish, dystopian future was actually our present...which has also been done before by the Distinguished Competition).

The fact that the past team wouldn't go back and then, eventually, couldn't go back was a pretty big deal, as it would violate all the laws of time travel known to man and mutant, in the Marvel Universe or otherwise. It was pretty much taken for granted that Bendis' run would end with either a restoration of the status quo, some sort of tweak, or, at the very least, an explanation. The fact that the end of his run was aligning nicely with Marvel's Crisis On Infinite Earths-like line-wide crossover story, the premise of which involved crashing alternate realities, suggested that Bendis could just take the easy way out and let Secret Wars hit the reboot button for him.

Well, to Marvel's credit, based on the books they've solicited post-Secret Wars, they don't seem to be using it as a way to un-do recent dramatic storylines, like the death of Wolverine, or the replacement of Captain America or Thor with new characters using their names and weapons. But the teenage X-Men all still seem to be hanging around after Secret Wars too, in a pair of books (most of them in a relaunched All-New X-Men, Jean Grey in Extraordinary X-Men), although Bendis is writing either. It really seems as if he's just passing the baton mid-story.

That's fine, I suppose; I'm sure the writers taking the baton aren't going to complain over-much since they're getting the paycheck associated with writing X-Men books, but it's unusual in these days of, a creator-specific runs on titles, which Marvel often talks about in terms of television-like "seasons," and certainly an unsatisfying pay-off to reading a book for so long.

It should be said that All-New X-Men does have the words "To be concluded...in Uncanny X-Men #600" at the botto of its last panel. Uncanny X-Men is the sister book to All-New, following the grown-up Cyclops and his allies at a rogue X-Men school, and also written by Bendis. That hasn't come out yet, nor will it...until after the conclusion of Secret Wars, which, evidence suggests will not put the teenage X-Men back where Bendis found them. (By the way, the last issue of Uncanny that Marvel published was #35, so they are apparently doing one of those random re-numbering stunts where big numbers are preferable to small ones, but only when they have two zeros in them.)

So if the final collection of the final issues of All-New X-Men doesn't include a conclusion, what does it include?

Well, nothing very good, that's for sure.

The first issue is by artist Mike Del Mundo, a rather prolific Marvel cover artist–one of their best–and it is a done-in-one story in which Emma Frost takes Jean Grey to Madripoor for some field training in the arts of psychic combat. She temporary blocks Jean's telepathy so that she'll have to rely solely on her telekinesis. Then she picks a fight with The Blob, who's been in Madripoor and addicted to Mutant Growth Hormone in the pages of Uncanny. There are a few, interesting and salient points about how Xavier and The X-Men turned out from the perspective of villainous mutants (including Emma, who is now at least more hero than villain), and perhaps something in a way of Bendis settling the "When is Jean going to freak out and become Dark Phoenix?" question for now. More annoying is his resolution of Cyclops' teams unreliable, "broken" powers. Emma declares that she fixed it off-panel, when no one was looking.

The art is predictably great.

That's followed by the two All-New X-Men chapters of the 13-part "Black Vortex" storyline, meaning that All-New followed the pattern of Legendary Star-Lord, and just stuck a few random chapters of the crossover into a trade collection. I've expressed my confusion at DC's habit of double-collecting crossover storylines like this in the past, but "Black Vortex" is the first time I've noticed Marvel doing it.

For an overlong aside, the problem is this. If you're an All-New X-Men reader following the book in trade, you're probably going to want to read all of "Black Vortex." Sure, there are a lot of wasted, pointless pages, but there are a few relevant bits to "your" storyline: Teen Cyclops is reunited with his team, Grown-Up Beast learns that the time-stream is irrevocably screwed-up and he can't return the kids home, Iceman and Angel get different designs, and their Professor Kitty Pryde gets engaged to Star-Lord. But here you just get 2/13ths of the story, and they are essentially unreadable in this form; I mean, you can read them, but they won't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. And if you then buy the "Black Vortex" collection, Guardians of The Galaxy & X-Men: Black Vortex, these issues will also be in there. So if you don't buy both trades, you're missing a chunk of story and getting charged for unreadable nonsense in All-New Vol. 7. If you do buy both All-New Vol. 7 and Black Vortex, you're paying for twice for the same 40 pages. (The solution? Just get your Marvel collections from the library like I do, I guess; it's still annoying to see the middle of this book full of Andrea Sorrentino's inappropriately realistic art, but at least you're spending any money on it!)

That, finally, brings us to the last two issues, "The Utopians" story from which the book takes its sub-title. Or, I suppose, I should say "story," as it's not really much of a story.

Back on earth after the events of "Black Vortex," the teen X-Men are just hanging out, enjoying not being in space, and eating fast food that Professor Magik brought them. Iceman Bobby Drake comments on how hot Magik is, at which point Jean pulls him aside and tells him he's gay. Yes, this is the Teen Iceman Is gay issue that you've likely heard about.

I can understand Bendis' intention, and it's not a bad one. The diversification of a superhero universe like The Marvel Universe is a noble goal, but, problematically, reaching that goal often involves legacy characters, which can boil down to simply giving new characters of color the  hand-me-down costumes and codenames of white characters...who almost always return to either reclaim or share the role with their one-time replacements (Think Green Lantern John Stewart, for example). This is because when the Marvel Universe was founded, there were few or any non-white, non-straight characters...and because it's extremely difficult to get a brand-new character to stick, regardless of race or sexual orientation. Even the legacy strategy doesn't always work, as readers simply don't embrace new characters or ideas or approaches in large enough numbers on a regular basis to guarantee success (Looking at recent books starring legacy characters that I personally enjoyed, Ms. Marvel sells well enough to stay in publication, but Ghost Rider did not, and was cancelled).

Outting a character previously thought of as straight is a little easier, since a reader can't "see" sexual orientation in the same way they can see race. Like, you can make The Punisher gay, but you can't make him black (Er, for very long, anyway). And if you're going to make a pre-existing, semi-prominent-ish Marvel character gay, why not Iceman? He seems pretty straight and all, having dated women (like Kitty Pryde, in the rather recent past), but, at the same time, he doesn't have, say, a Mary Jane Watson in his life or anything, you know? (Actually, has Beast had any long-term, serious, character-defining relationships with women? I know he's currently dating SWORD's Abigail Brand off-and-on, but before that? When Grant Morrison first took over the X-Men, he had Beast outting himself as gay, and Cyclops continually arguing with Beast that he's not gay, he's just trying to be provocative. Those were weird exchanges, and nothing ever came of them, either way, that I recall.)

The way Bendis handles it, however, is pretty problematic, from Jean telling Bobby he's gay and then arguing with him that he's gay, definitely not bi, but gay. More problematic still is the fact that they both seem to agree that grown-up Bobby Drake isn't gay (and Jean should know, if she knows teen Bobby is gay). That implies that being gay is a choice, and that grown-up Bobby chose not to be gay because he came of age in the 1960s (or, on a sliding timeline, is it the 1980s or 1990s now?) when society was less accepting of gays, but now teen Bobby is coming of age in a post-Obergefell world, so he can choose to be gay if he wants. I know there are still plenty of folks that do think it's a choice, and while I doubt Bendis is one of them, his story seems to imply that it's a choice rather than something determined at birth. (Also, with two Icemen running around the Marvel Universe, this isn't so much the same thing as Marvel's Iceman being gay as it is a Iceman being gay; technically they're the same person, but, looked at another way, this Iceman is an alternate version, and having him be gay isn't really as big a deal, in the same way Ultimate Colossus being gay wouldn't be the same as Colossus being gay, you know?)

Given the fact that this is Bendis' second-to-last issue of the series, it also seems somewhat mercenary. I hate to assign motivations to someone, so maybe it's unfair to say this is here simply to gain attention (and money), but it can seem that way, given the fact that Bendis is doing it right before jumping ship, rather than, say, 40 issues ago.

Anyway, a few other things happen in this first chapter of "The Utopians," although the Bobby conversation accounts for six of the 20 pages. The Utopian-related business lasts only six pages (two of which are a double-page spread).

Remember Utopia, the island nation the X-Men founded prior to the Cyclops/Wolverine schism? Well, it's been abandoned for a while, but recently seven completely random mutants wearing blue and gold uniforms (only one of whom I recognized on sight) have decided to make their home in the ruins of Utopia, and violently repel invaders.

Having attacked scavengers and then a SHIELD team, they appear to be trouble for the outside world. So, in part two, Maria Hill asks the teen X-Men to look into it for her, and they do. In this second issue, captions name all of The Utopians, and so I can name the ones who aren't Boom Boom: Random, Masque, Elixir, Karma and Madison Jeffries. So the All-New X-Men and The Utopians fight for a few pages. Then they decide to stop fighting, and the All-New X-Men take them back to their base, the recently-shuttered New Xavier School (the repurposed Weapon X facility), and the X-Men invite the other mutants to live there, and that doesn't seem any worse a place to live than the ruins of an island. At the very least, it ought to be easier to get food.

Jean wonders what they can change, since it's hard out there for a mutant, and then the issue, and thus All-New X-Men ends. Thanks for reading! I guess!

These last two issues were both drawn by Mahmud Asrar, who is very good at his job, and whose style is a nice fit with the general style of this title, although his are the only issues that look like they adhere to that style in this particular volume. I suppose we'll–well, I'll–have to wait until the final collection of Uncanny X-Men to see if Bendis does indeed have an ending in mind for his X-Men epic or not, and before Marvel publishes that, they need to publish Uncanny X-Men #600, but before they publish that, they have to publish Secret Wars, I guess.

But for now? Everyone out of the car; All-New X-Men is over. Not concluded, just over.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Review: Wolverine & The X-Men Vol. 1: Tomorrow Never Learns

When first I read Wolverine & The X-Men #1–not the Wolverine & The X-Men #1 that Marvel released in 2011 upon launching the title, but the Wolverine & The X-Men #1 Marvel released in 2014 after re-launching the title because a new writer was taking over–I was struck by how pointless the endeavor seemed. In the previous volume of the series, which lasted 42 issues, writer Jason Aaron (and the various artists he worked with), told one, big completely complete story arc. He (and they) pushed the X-Men and Wolverine in a new-ish direction, re-establishing the idea of the original X-Men as teachers to new mutants (previously explored most thoroughly by Grant Morrison during his millennial run) while making Wolverine the reluctant headmaster of the newly re-christened Jean Grey School.

They introduced plenty of new characters, reinvented and repositioned plenty of old characters and invested all of those characters and the franchise with things it had been missing for way too long: A sense of fun, an aura of old-school superhero wonder, a spirit of adventure and plenty of post-modern Silver Age-style craziness...even zaniness. Job done. Aaron concluded his run, and went on to his next Wolverine-related book (Amazing X-Men, which launched as an Aaron-written showcase for Wolverine's squad of X-Men, the "real" X-Men in the five-headed hydra of the line*, but that book went off the rails after just one story arc).

So with the story of Wolverine & The X-Men already told, complete with much of its cast finding various resolutions, from leaving the stage in permanent-ish fashion or graduating, what exactly was there for a Wolverine & The X-Men title to do?

That first issue I read focused on perennial troublemaker Quentin Quire (a Morrison creation) angst-ing over his new role at the school as a teacher's assistant, given that he just graduated, while Wolverine is off doing Wolverine stuff and the Evan/Genesis (aka The Kid Who Might Grow Up To Be Apocalypse) conflict gets dragged out again. Writer Jason Latour included a few panels in which Beast literally phones-in a cameo to explain that he wouldn't be in the book, nor would most of the other X-Men, as Wolverine apparently approved leave for almost the entire faculty.

And indeed, the school would seem pretty deserted through this entire story arc (which accounts for one half of the 12-issue run of the Latour-written Wolverine & The X-Men). Wolverine, Storm, Doop and just-graduated Armor account for all of the X-Men in this book, with Quentin, Idie and Evan the students who play any real roles, although several other familiar faces from the previous run show up to fill out crowd scenes in the halls of the school and move scenes forward: Eye-Boy, Rockslide, Hellion, etc.

Yes, after I read that first issue, I was unconvinced there was any point to continuing to publish a Wolverine & The X-Men book (Marvel would agree not many months later, as they ended the book at issue #12 with Wolverine's death, replacing it with the even shorter-lived, school-based Spider-Man and The X-Men).

But after reading the first volume? Well, the book's existence no longer seemed pointless, and, in fact, I actually found myself feeling rather bad for Latour, who does a great job of writing these characters, particularly default main character Quentin Quire, and who seems to have gotten a fairly bum deal here, having to relaunch a new version of a very good, rather popular and acclaimed series, but with a greatly reduced cast and with various outside pressures informing what he could and couldn't do: This volume deals almost exclusively with fall-out from the time-travel shenanigans in "Battle of The Atom", and the upcoming second volume naturally deals with Wolverine's death, which was being telegraphed hard as far back as the first issue in this series.

The storyline is still remarkably complex, and lurches quite a bit, as new angles are introduced and then forgotten immediately. I forgave a great deal of the complexity on the basis that I just didn't remember the events of "Battle of The Atom" all that clearly, nor did I have the deep knowledge of X-Men lore to follow certain plot points until they were explained later (For example, when new [?] character Faithful John appears and beats the hell out of Wolverine saying he was trained by Askani Priests, I assumed that he was talking martial arts, not Phoenix worshippers from the future or...whatever). (After reading and writing about this, I checked Paul O'Brien's X-Axis for his take, and while he is probably the most expert writer-about-the-X-Men that I know of, he found he book ridiculously convoluted; you can read O'Brien's superior review here.)

So the basic plot, as far as I understood it, seems to be as follows. Something calling itself The Phoenix Corporation appears out of nowhere, it's teenage CEO Edan Younge making some very bold claims. This gets under the skin of both Quentin, already dealing with a bit of an identity crisis as he goes from bad kid in school to teaching assistant, who learned he'll be The Phoenix at some point in the future, and Wolverine, who thinks the corporation is disrespecting Jean's memory.

They both make a bee-line toward the Phoenix Corp's HQ (at which point the corporate angle is abandoned), and they are faced with powerful opponents. Younge plays head-games with Quentin, making him question his identity and destiny, while Faithful John–a powerful psychic from the future–beats up Wolverine and Storm and then heads for the school in an attempt to kill Evan before he can ever become Apocalypse.

What gradually emerges is that both Younge and Faithful John are agents of grown-up, Future Quentin, who manipulated them both to prevent Present Quentin from growing up to be Future Quentin, as Future Quentin killed Future Evan when Future Evan became Future Apocalypse, I guess...?

I want to say it's a simple idea communicated in a needlessly complicated fashion in order to make its revelations more dramatic, but then we are dealing with time travel paradoxes and since time travel in the Marvel Universe is supposedly "broken" and there's so much goddam time travel going on in the X-books these days that it's really a story we could do without...despite the fact that Latour has some interesting ideas to play with in terms of Evan and Quentin as characters coming of age, both with big, terrible destinies tied to big, broad forces within the X-Men mythology.

Latour also does a rather fine job of focusing on Quentin and Wolverine as parallel characters in many way. The nature of the conflict might naturally demand that Evan be paid the attention that goes to Wolverine, but, well, this book is called Wolverine & The X-Men, so Wolverine's really gotta be the, or at least a, star. In truth, the book could have been retitled Quentin Quire and Wolverine...And Some X-Men Too.

I can't say I followed the twists and turns of the plot, but I tend to give up really quickly on trying where X-Men history and, especially, X-Men time travel is involved. Latour is on much more solid footing when it comes to the scripting over the plotting, and he does a particularly strong job with Quentin's voice (in dialogue and narration) and Quentin's interactions with the other characters, particularly during a brief visit to Cyclops' school.

Latour also balances comedy with melodrama pretty well, particularly when it comes to Doop, who gets a two-page sequence at the beginning of the fifth issue that serves as the climax of the sort of things Doop gets up to between panels and pages.

I think the book would have worked far better were these issues #43-#48 of Wolverine & The X-Men, with Latour and artist Mahmud Asrar simply inheriting the title from Aaron and his artistic collaborators. I already knew all of these characters, and the set-up having read the previous 42  issues of the previous volume of the title, but Latour makes little to no effort to explain, well, anything.

The Phoneix Force is sort of defined, at least as Younge sees it, but there's no explanation given as to who any of the pre-existing characters are, who or what Apocalypse is, what's the deal with his Horsemen, what Bamfs are (and they are used extensively throughout as transportation and psychic thralls of a bad guy), why Wolverine can't heal, what the fuck Fantomex's "The World" is, who Fantomex is and on and on.

For the first story arc of a brand-new series, this sure read like the tenth story arc of a series already in-progress.

In addition to being a mess in terms of plot, it is a particularly unwelcoming and unforgiving mess for newcomers; this is not the X-Men book anyone should start with. That said, it's a fun mess, with some compelling ideas swirling around within it. And it's a smart mess, perhaps a sign of Latour's ambition exceeding his ability (or his ability within the confines of the X-Men franchise and unseen editorial constraints, if we want to give him the benefit of the doubt), as both his lead characters spot the plot holes, comment on the plot holes and continually reject the villains' stated motivations as excuses and lies they tell themselves.

Visually, the book is much stronger. Asrar manages all four of the first issues solo, and starts getting help on the last two, only the final issue of which looks messy and unlike his work. That's also about the point the book stops making sense anyway, though, so the changing, sloppier visuals aren't the detriment they might have otherwise been. He gets a lot less to work with in terms of cast and overall insane visuals compared to the folks who drew the previous run of a comic book with this title, but he designs and draws every character he's given extremely well. I could read Asrar art forever, I think.



*Just to review, if you need it: All-New X-Men featured the time-traveling, teenage original X-Men, who started out at the Jean Grey School under Wolverine, but later jumped ship for Cyclops' school for no logical reason; Uncanny X-Men featured Cyclops' rebel "New Xavier School" lead by a handful of his still-loyal allies and new, emerging teenage mutants; Uncanny Avengers featured the "Avengers Unity Squad" of half-mutant, half-non-mutant heroes, lead by Havok; X-Men was the random group of female X-Men based at the Jean Grey School that sometimes existed as a distinct team unit and sometimes didn't, depending on the writer and the story; and Amazing X-Men featured the the faculty of the Jean Grey School, regardless of gender: Wolverine, Storm, Beast and so on. There were, as always, plenty of ancillary books starring mutants and having X's in the titles, but these were the five that featured the actual X-Men, divided into roughly two camps of Team Cyclops and Team Wolverine.

**************************

I can't be 100% sure without seeing them all side by side, but I'm fairly confident than the "animal variant" for the first issue of this series, featuring Wolverine as a cat, or a cat in Wolverine's costume, is the very best of all the animal variants.

I like this Arthur Adams variant cover a lot too, even if both Storm and Wolverine have some pretty ridiculous anatomies, and that the way their costumes are drawn make them look as if their costumes are painted on, rather than worn.

This one is of interest too because it features a couple of students who were featured in the previous, Jason Aaron-written run, but don't appear at all in the first volume of this Jason Latour-written run, namely Shark Girl, Brood and...whoever the girl with wings is. I forget.

I liked this cover a lot, too. I don't know that the contents necessarily reflected the cover, but it's a fine symbolic representation of the school weighing heavily on, and threatening to crush, Storm.

Friday, June 05, 2015

Review: All-New X-Men Vol. 6: The Ultimate Adventure

The sub-title of this volume is a joke, of course, as the story arc that ran through issues #31-36 of All-New X-Men was neither "ultimate" in that it was the final one, nor was it ultimate in that it was the "best achievable or imaginable of its kind." Rather, it took place in the Ultimate Universe, home to Marvel's once robust, now-waning line of Ultimate comics.

Get it?

No, it's not that funny, but what else could writer Brian Michael Bendis have called it instead? It is, essentially, just a way to usher the stars of this particular book–four of the five time-lost teenage X-Men founders, plus X-23–out of the way while Bendis focuses on a fairly major turning point in his X-Men narrative in Uncanny X-Men, the issues dealing with the reading of Charles Xavier's will, and the omega-plus level mutant Matthew Malloy. As we've seen, the end result of those events were pretty dramatic on the status quo of these two X-books, and having these particular mutants around for the proceedings would have made them a lot messier, as their importance to X-Men history has a tendency to warp things around them. That may be one of the reasons Bendis keeps sending them off into outer space for adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy (this story arc was immediately followed by their second such team-up, following The Trial of Jean Grey).

Instead of shooting them off to space, here he shunts them into a parallel universe. (While these collections read more-or-less well-structured in this format, when one takes a few steps back and considers the mega-story, it is kind of weird that Bendis brought the "First Class" X-Men to the present, and then has spent so much time finding busy work for them, as if marking time between Age of Ultron and Secret Wars, isn't it?)

For brevity's sake, I'll try not to get too off topic, but suffice it to say that the Ultimate Universe is not what it once was.

Originally a 2-4 title imprint with writers Bendis and Mark Millar boiling a few concepts down to their essences and updating them for the 21st century–Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four–while eschewing all of the things that kept potential new readers from trying out superhero universe comics–high issue numbers, decades worth of continuity, crossovers, stunts and resurrections, reboots and headline grabbing changes of status quo. Within a few years, the line became everything it was supposed to not be, to the point that it was even a more unwieldy and unfriendly place for new readers than the core Marvel Universe (I've tried returning to it several times after dropping the books–somewhere around the time they jumped form $2.99 to $3.99 in price and Ultimate Spider-Man re-numbered for no reason–and have found it nearly impossible to find my footing. The Ultimates/Avengers franchise in particular, as its consisted of "seasons" and miniseries by at least a half-dozen different writers, and many of the big events that have shaped and changed the team happen in miniseries unconnected to The Ultimates/Ultimate Avengers in terms of titling).

While Bendis' still on-going Ultimate Spider-Man run hasn't been too bad, having "only" renumbered and been re-titled three or four times (that I know of), killing off Peter Parker and replacing him with Miles Morlaes at one point, the X-Men franchise has been a real mess. It went through three writers before I dropped it–Millar, Bendis and Brian K. Vaughan, with a Chuck Austen fill-in–and, as with The Ultimates, carried on in various mini-series and event stories that made them difficult to keep up with once one stopped paying attention to the line for very long.

As All-New X-Men is an X-Men comic, the cast's visit to the Ultimate universe is naturally going to be most concerned with the Ultimate X-Men. This is unfortunate, to the point that it may explain why Bendis gives the most panel-time to Miles Morales of any character from the Ultimate universe; that, or his tendency to cross his titles over with one another, perhaps to try and cross-pollinate the sales of each. While Ultimate Spider-Man and Doom are in here too (I always liked the goat legs, if not the blanket draped over him), this is in large part a sort of All-New X-Men/Ultimate X-Men crossover and, I'll be honest, I have no idea what the deal with the latter is.

I'm not entirely convinced Bendis does either, after reading this. I recognized Storm, Jean Grey, Iceman and Rogue, who are all easily identifiable by their powers and/or hairstyles, but there was also a brunette with no costume who never used her powers (who turned out to be Kitty Pryde, with a new, more stylish haircut than the last time I read a comic with Ultimate Kitty Pryde in it), a blonde kid with Wolverine claws who turned out to be Ultimate Wolverine's son, Jimmy (?), a lady with Human Torch powers who is never named, and a blonde guy with terrible hair who is also never named, but disappears midway through the story anyway.

As for the story, it opens with a three-page sequence set in the Ultimate Universe, which reveals that Ultimate Tony Stark is still around, and that they've got an Amadeus Cho, too. They're talking about a portal to another universe, and then the portal shuts itself off. It probably had something to do with that time Miles Morales visited the Marvel Universe, or 616 Galactus tried to eat the Ultimate Earth.

Meanwhile, back in the regular Marvel Universe, the "All-New" team watches as all teachers leave to go be in Uncanny for a couple of months, and then Teen Beast starts tinkering with Cerebro, because that is convenient to the plot. Then he detects a new mutant, and he, Jean, Iceman, Angel and X-23 go to recruit her, deciding to leave the rest of the students there, because that's convenient to the plot. The new mutant's power? She can open portals to alternate universes. That's extremely convenient to the plot.

Naturally, they all get thrown into the Ultimate universe, and are separated.

Iceman finds himself fighting Ultimate Mole Man and friends under Ultimate Atlanta. Jean Grey winds up in New York, and meets Miles. Beast ends up in Latveria, and is kidnapped by Ultimate Doctor Doom, aka Victor Van Damme (Hey, I totally forgot that was his name!). X-23 ends up in the middle of a football game...somewhere, then steals a motorcycle, climbs on the back of a truck and travels to Canada in, like, a few hours (Apparently unsure she's in a different universe, she tries going back to their base, which exists there, but is obviously pretty different). Angel ends up in The Ultimate Savage Land, where he meets the new Ultimate Wolverine (The pair of them get to the Ultimate Canadian tundra about the same time that X-23 does, despite traveling there from the south pole).

And the mutant who got them all there in the first place? She's essentially out of the story until the last issue, when she's needed to send them home.

So the plot is basically inconsequential, involving the various All-New X-Men visiting various characters in the Ultimate Universe, comparing notes, and then teaming up with Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimate X-Men for a big showdown with Doctor Van Damme, and then going home, because the story is over.

It's extremely thin on plot, and essentially pointless–Wolverine Jr. mentions that on his world, human beings created mutants in a lab, a big difference between the two universes, but it doesn't come to anything. There's perhaps some interesting character bits for Jean Grey here. If she were an actress on a TV show playing two parts, this might be a fun string of episodes for that actress, but here it's just one more example of Jean Grey meeting one more example of an alternate version of herself. At one point, she herself bemoans the repetitive, pointless nature of their adventures, complaining that not only is she in the wrong time, she's also in the wrong place.

Were this 2002 and anyone at all cared at all about the Ultimate universe, a meeting between the Marvel Universe X-Men and The Ultimate X-Men might have been something of an occasion, particularly since this was one of those things that then-Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said would never, ever happen, and was therefore having Marvel cross the streams like this would have been akin to an inter-company crossover fans thought they'd never see; maybe not JLA/Avengers, which they were waiting on for years, but maybe, I don't know, Batman/Daredevil.

But now? This is something like the fourth or fifth (at least) crossover (or semi-crossover, as in the case of some of the Marvel Zombies business, and that one thing with the Squadron Supreme), at least the second by this very writer (and prominently featuring Miles Morlaes) and the characters involved are an alternate version of the Marvel Universe X-Men and what is essentially the dregs of the Ultimate X-Men; Jean and Iceman are the only ones with Ultimate analogues around and, as I mentioned, several of these Ultiamte X-Men are so negligible that they don't even have names.

Pointless or not, Bendis does still write conversations well (even if everyone sounds like various degrees of wise-cracking Spider-Man...which works well for the Icemans, but not so much with, say, X-23). My favorite bit was probably Beast's line of questioning of the new mutant, Carmen, upon their first meeting her. Mahmud Asrar's artwork is excellent, and seems to get better as the book progresses, so that the scenes at the end seem much cleaner and smoother than those at the beginning (although the colorists do change at least once during the course of the events.

The covers are all very, very misleading, implying that Ultimate Spider-Man is visiting the All-New X-Men, and obscuring which universe is host to which visitor (Also, Teen Cyclops is on the cover of the trade for some reason, despite not appearing within the story at all; I suppose he's still in space with his dad).