Robert Kirkman Ultimate X-Men mega-Storytime

I've been a fan of Robert Kirkman for years and years now, having been reading Invincible and The Walking Dead and various other smaller projects like Marvel Zombies and Destroyer and Irredemable Ant-Man and really enjoying all of it. But for whatever reason, even though I loved Millar's run on Ultimate X-Men, I never got around to reading Kirkman's years-long run on the book.

I have therefore decided to, over the course of a few days, storytime his entire Ultimate X-Men run and read it along with all of you for the first time and see how it is. Feel free to chatter about it as I do so; it's nice to have company in these endeavours.

We start with issue 66. I have no idea what was going on in the story before this, so let's just jump right in and see how it goes!

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Okay, so apparently Beast is dead, and we're doing a phoenix thing. Wasn't there already a Phoenix story arc during Millar's run on the book? Ah, well, I'm sure it'll all be fine.

Ugh, Vaughan left him with gold and Kirkman turned it all to shit. Dude was the beginning of the end for this book.

"Her little adventures with Spider-Man." Okay, that made me laugh; the thing which motivated me to do this is the fact that someone was tossing out their collection of 22 volumes of Ultimate Spider-Man, which I nabbed and read, and reminded me of how much I liked this setting.

Austen's few Ultimate X-Men issues are actually great too randomly

Was that Brian K. Vaughn? I didn't even know he'd done a run on the book. If so I kind of regret not having read his run before doing this thread. Always enjoyed his work on Runaways and Ex Machina.

>I've been a fan of Robert Kirkman for years and years now
I'm sorry.

I always felt like Austin got too much crap for his Uncanny X-Men run. There were some genuinely shitty ideas, like - most notoriously - The Draco, but there was a lot of fun in there, and he was willing to explore themes no other writer before him had. He was the one who put to bed the whole absurd "Iceman is gay" headcanon that had been going around for years and squash it in-canon once and for all.

Yeah, it really sucks, reading things you enjoy and deriving fun and entertainment from it. I appreciate your sympathy. It means a lot to me.

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Man, being an Ultimate X-Men fan over the years must've been suffering.

You know, it's weird. Normally I kind of resent it when a new writer comes on-board an existing series and kind of disregards or discards what the previous writer had been doing. Killing off central supporting characters, ditching sublots and such, but reading this without familiarity with what came before I am suddenly gaining new appreciation for that approach. Feeling a little lost here. Hopefully it'll sort itself out before long.

I loved Millar's run, but when Bendis took over I just couldn't maintain my interest; the characterizations were just too different and too jarring for me to maintain my attachment to the story. Never got back into it before it ended after that, either.

I'm probably Austen's biggest defender
no one remembers at the time, New X-Men was coming out slow as shit, Claremont was doing boring fetish stuff as always and Casey was just being the fucking worst thing ever
Milligan was gold but it was too weird for most the X-crowd
Austen was dragged in by execs to quickly execute competent scripts that were fun, action packed and soapy, aka X-bread & butter
he did was he was told
his Metropolis series is hella underated and Man of Steel issue is great too
Austen did nothing wrong and the Draco was a Claremont idea that he pushed for, hinted at multiple times previously and has referenced since

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>the Draco was a Claremont idea that he pushed for, hinted at multiple times previously and has referenced since

I always wondered about that. It felt so out of place in Austen's run that I always sort of wondered if it was an editorially mandated thing where his heart wasn't in it and he just did a half-assed job on something that he wasn't into. It was an unexpected low-point in his run, and doesn't feel like it fit in at all.

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Ah, young love. It strikes unexpectedly and with unexpected force.

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>Lilandra

Well, okay! I guess now we're doing this! Boy, I honestly didn't see that one coming. I figured for sure she would be Selene.

It occurs to me that I've never read a Kirkman book with so many protagonists. Even The Walking Dead is mostly just Rick and his nearest and dearest, with a few subplots with whatever members of the supporting cast are currently alive and relevant. This is quite the departure for him.

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You know, Jean, maybe you could just... I don't know... reach into his head and reprogram his sexuality a little bit to suit your tastes a bit better. History has shown us that there's no negative blowback to Jeans doing that sort of thing.

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Okay, gotta step out for a short bit. I'll resume with the next issue in 20 minutes or so.

This happened with any book Bendis took over, or borrowed characters from, from the Thunderbolts to the Avengers.

so basically Austen took the blame for writing a stupid Claremont plot
I got into comics in 93 so he wasn't my X-writer and could never get into his writing years later
like he did a bunch of great things but should of been kicked off years before and let younger writers do interesting things instead of being so selfish and full of fetishes

>Read Ultimate X-Men for years
>Soldier through the rough patches, of which there are many
>Rewarded with Ultimatum, where most of the cast dies and the Xavier mansion is destroyed
>Continue to Ultimate X-Men, where the remaining cast all turn on each other and even more people die
>Culminate with Secret Wars, where absolutely everybody dies horribly when the fucking universe is destroyed
>Given an epilogue with X-Men Blue, where it's revealed that the X-Men who did survive the destruction of the Ultimate universe were all tortured to death by Miss Sinister, leaving Jimmy "Logan-Lite" Hudson as the only surviving, non-brainwashed Ultimate X-Man.

>Given an epilogue with X-Men Blue, where it's revealed that the X-Men who did survive the destruction of the Ultimate universe were all tortured to death by Miss Sinister, leaving Jimmy "Logan-Lite" Hudson as the only surviving, non-brainwashed Ultimate X-Man.

Oh, god, are you serious? I haven't read that run, but that seems so pointlessly cruel. What reason was there for doing that rather than have them just wiped out with the death of their world?

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>What's happening to me?

That is a perfectly valid question, nameless redhead. Let's see if the following issues addresses it or if you're just a weird little vignette which will remain forever unresolved. My money is on the former.

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I love Logan's "Fuck your backstory. Let's get to the fightin'" approach here.

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For god's sake, Charles, just look at the way her facial features are migrating randomly around on her face. Can't you recognize an alien when you're looking at one?

Miss Sinister did manage to capture the Ultimate X-Men who did survive. She's been experimenting on them since she learned that their X-Gene was man-made.

She currently has her own team of New Mauraders made up of Ultimate Armor, Guardian, and Mach-II. She mentions that there were originally more, but most of them were killed by the experiments, and as an 'example' of the Ultimate X-Men who did survive, they use a group shot of Storm, Rogue, Kitty and Iceman, implying they were the ones who survived, were caught by Sinister, and died from the experiments.

I'm betting Rogue is right and it really is nothing to worry about. There's no reason why assuming this will come back to bite anyone in the ass.

Well that's just heartbreaking. I actually did get back into reading the final run of Ultimate X-Men when Brian Wood was writing and really enjoyed it tremendously. A lot more than I'd have expected to. The fact that they struggled so fiercely for survival in the face of the impending end of their universe is sad enough, but to know they somehow made it through that only to be killed off-page is all the more depressing.

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I have to say, I like the way Raney draws Sabretooth here. There's something subtly ghoulish and monstrous about him that just barely puts him in uncanny valley territory. Nothing overtly bestial, but somehow not quite right, either.

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>Do you know why?

I'm betting it's because secretly they're the same person. I'm laying money on that before I read the page I'm posting right now. Let's see if I'm right.

I'm betting Sabretooth is lying and in fact they are the same person. Time travel or something. That's my headcanon and nothing will dissuade me from it.

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>I take it you've heard that name before?

Well no I haven't, but if you have some pamphlets you could leave with me I'd be happy to read over them on the drive home.

I'm really surprised Rogue hadn't received a replacement for this suit by this point in the run. It was one of the worst super-hero costumes I've ever seen.

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is the draco the thing about Nightcrawler being half demon?

Something like that. I don't know that it was ever really fully explained what his father and their people were. I think it was something like "we're a subspecies of mutants who look so demonic that people based some of their demon folklore upon misunderstandings of us." Which doesn't really fit into a setting like the Marvel Universe when there are already actual demons who routinely interact with humankind.

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>Mach-II.
I liked her she was like a mini magento

Yeah, she was great for stirring the pot in the dying days of the Ultimate universe, and the thematic connection between her and Magneto was a nice symbolic touch. The bellicose counterpoint to Kitty's more moderate leadership approach.

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I'll be interested to see how - if at all - this reconciles with the fact that mutant DNA is man-made in this setting. Had Ultimate Origin or whatever that mini which established that fact come out yet by this point?

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I am one of the (probably less than 5) people in the world who care about Abyss, Nils Styger, who was retconned as Nightcrawler's half brother in that story.
He is most known for being one of the Horsemen of Apocalypse in the 1995 AoA.
He has been depowered since M Day, and only appeared in PADs X-Factor and All New X-Factor, first when Quicksilver was trying to repower depowered mutants with terrigen mist (that worked, but it was going to kill them them, Abyss realized what was going to happen and hid himself, Reaper and Fatale in the brimstone dimension he can access through his chest)
there their bodies were like frozen in time, so they didnt blow up from terrigen mist poisoning, and years later they were rescued by an evil AIM scientist who drained the terrigen mist from their bodies to give himself their powers, leaving them depowered again.

I kinda have a preference for toyetic non human looking xmen characters, like Abyss or Sauron.

>Kitty, are you back already?

"No, Peter, I won't be arriving for another half an hour yet. What you're seeing now is a projection of things to come. You've just developed the mutant power of precognition."

"What?"

"Yeah, I'm back already."

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Jeez, Nick, you don't have to look so GLEEFUL about it. You're being weird.

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And there's our first story arc done with. As much of a departure from what I usually like about Kirkman's work as this is, I'm digging it so far.

I'll be back in 20 minutes or so with another issue or two.

And we're back with the next issue in sequential order after the previous one posted! Goddamn do I love a sane and linear progression of numbers.

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I was wondering where Angel was during that last storyline. Does anyone who'd been following the book at the time know if this was set up in the previous writer's run?

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"Okay, sure, fine. Jeans and tee-shirts. But let's not pretend that I'm letting go of this costume issue until I get some satisfactory answers. This is priority one, Cyclops."

"I just think..."

"PRIORITY ONE."

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