{"id":2738,"date":"2015-03-02T22:34:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-02T22:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2738"},"modified":"2015-03-02T22:34:33","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T22:34:33","slug":"all-new-x-men-vol-6-the-ultimate-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2738","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Men vol 6 – “The Ultimate Adventure”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while – a long while – since I’ve been able to say this, but there’s a podcast this week! \u00a0Check one post down\u00a0for the new\u00a0House to Astonish<\/em> episode.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile\u2026\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>\u00a0visits the Ultimate Universe in a story that ran long. \u00a0This was originally solicited as a five parter, it winds up at six, and it’s gone off schedule enough that issue #38 ended up shipping ahead of issue #37 (to avoid screwing up the\u00a0Black Vortex<\/em> crossover).<\/p>\n

There was a window of opportunity to visit the Ultimate Universe and have it be a really big deal. \u00a0That window closed\u00a0a while back, and today, it’s\u00a0pretty much\u00a0boarded up. \u00a0The Ultimate Universe had a good\u00a0run as a successful imprint, but several failed relaunches down the line, the end\u00a0seems\u00a0to be nigh.<\/p>\n

Part of Marvel’s pitch for the upcoming\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> is that\u00a0it’s going to merge the Ultimate Universe with the Marvel Universe. \u00a0It’s difficult to get terribly wound up about this, because as we discussed on the podcast, it pretty much just means that Miles Morales, and possibly Ultimate Nick Fury, will be slotted into\u00a0the established continuity. \u00a0It’s not like there are other\u00a0Ultimate characters\u00a0where there would be an obvious advantage to having them supplant the originals. \u00a0It’s a one book line now, and that one book is not\u00a0Ultimate X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But since the line has\u00a0to go out with a bang – and no doubt also because Bendis is fond of the place – it’s necessary\u00a0to\u00a0build it up\u00a0one last time.<\/p>\n

With Scott’s team off attending the reading of Charles Xavier’s will in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, the\u00a0All-New<\/em> team are left to respond to\u00a0a new mutant. \u00a0Carmen has the power to involuntarily open portals to other continuities,\u00a0so she’s that popular Bendis figure, Plot Advancement Lass, who has the power to conveniently do whatever is necessary to advance the plot. \u00a0Layla Miller started as one of these too. \u00a0Beyond opening plot-vital portals, Carmen’s\u00a0personality\u00a0consists, pretty much in its entirety,\u00a0of looking befuddled and scared – which is logical enough, but still makes her basically a one-note trope attached to a plot point. \u00a0In fact, she drops out of the\u00a0story\u00a0as soon as she’s served her purpose, and doesn’t appear again until the end.<\/p>\n

This leads to everyone being scattered around the Ultimate Universe. \u00a0So Iceman gets to fight the\u00a0Ultimate Mole Man, Jean meets Ultimate Spider-Man, Angel goes to the Ultimate Savage Land to meet Wolverine’s son James Hudson, Beast gets captured by Doctor Doom, and X-23\u2026 well, she just gets chased around a bit.<\/p>\n

The obvious problem with all of this is: who the hell cares? \u00a0Who gives a toss about Ultimate Doctor Doom, at this stage? \u00a0What does any of this have to do with the title characters? \u00a0They’re already fish out of water as their basic gimmick, so moving them to the Ultimate Universe\u00a0doesn’t really add anything to that.<\/p>\n

Well, we do get some of Jean Grey lamenting that this is just the latest example of how little the X-Men are achieving with their second chance at life. \u00a0And it’s true that they’ve achieved very little, but that feels mostly like a symptom of the book’s directionlessness. \u00a0We do get some mention of the different origin for mutants in the Ultimate Universe, but it has nothing to do with the plot and just leads to people\u00a0doing more lamenting. \u00a0And we do get the Ultimate X-Men showing up as guest stars – but the book pretty much relies on you already regarding this as Helluva Cool, instead of giving you any particular reason to think so.<\/p>\n

It’s possible that if you stuck with\u00a0Ultimate X-Men<\/em> to the bitter end, there might be stuff going on here that interests you. \u00a0I\u00a0dropped it years ago and\u00a0what I get out of this book is a bunch of characters wandering around essentially random elements of an alternate reality that isn’t particularly different from the main one for six issues until it’s time to go home. \u00a0The big climax is a fight with Dr Doom to rescue the Beast, but that’s pretty much just a fight that drags out for two issues in the hope that page count will give it the epic scale that the concepts lack.<\/p>\n

If there’s a point to this, it’s to\u00a0remind readers about the Ultimate Universe\u00a0which they don’t buy any more, and\u00a0in that sense build to\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>. \u00a0But then if there’s a point to anything in\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>, it’s to build to\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>, in the sense of endlessly foreshadowing it\u00a0while marking time.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0upcoming relaunch of the line interests me. \u00a0In that sense, I guess you could claim that Bendis is doing his job here, but it’s not so much that All-New<\/em> is building anticipation for\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>. \u00a0The mechanics of\u00a0how we get to the relaunch, I\u00a0remain sceptical about. \u00a0I’m interested in what comes\u00a0after<\/em> that. \u00a0London is an interesting destination; that does not prevent the M1 being a monumentally tedious\u00a0drive.<\/p>\n

If you aren’t seriously passionate about the Ultimate Universe – and judging from the sales figures over the last few years, you aren’t – this is self-indulgent tedium of the worst sort. \u00a0It’s also complacent – the whole thing rests on the assumption that people are excited about a trip to the Ultimate Universe, despite the evidence of said sales figures, since god knows it does nothing to explain to us why we should care about any of this.<\/p>\n

It’s not as if the Ultimate Universe is inherently interesting\u00a0viewed as an alternate\u00a0MU. \u00a0It’s simply a cover version which is mildly different in various ways. \u00a0So for there to be any particular interest in a crossover, it really needs to be a living place,\u00a0or something far enough in the past\u00a0to\u00a0make the crossover a nostalgia thing. \u00a0The frisson is metatextual; it’s not to do with any particular high concept of the Ultimate Universe. \u00a0So this precise moment in time – with the Ultimate Universe around, but about to breathe its last – is the very hardest\u00a0time to be doing this sort of story (unless you’re actually going to play off the UU’s last-legs status, but\u00a0for\u00a0perfectly understandable reasons,\u00a0Bendis isn’t going to do that).<\/p>\n

The result is\u00a0pointless, boring and complacent. \u00a0I sat down to re-read it before writing this and I nearly gave up twice. \u00a0This doesn’t happen often.<\/p>\n

Still, the end is in sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while – a long while – since I’ve been able to say this, but there’s a podcast this week! \u00a0Check one post down\u00a0for the new\u00a0House to Astonish episode. Meanwhile\u2026\u00a0All-New X-Men\u00a0visits the Ultimate Universe in a story that ran long. \u00a0This was originally solicited as a five parter, it winds up at six, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2738"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2948,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2738\/revisions\/2948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}