Ultimate X-Men #98

Knowing that this title is ending in two issues kind of makes reading this feel like going through the motions.  The ironic thing is that the quality of the book has picked up with the departure of Robert Kirkman, who just never seemed to get a grip on the characters and wasn't able to bring his Invincible magic over. 

So now we're just winding up, whistling Semisonic's "Closing Time" as we watch the characters prepare to take part in a major crossover.

Ultimatium's tide has already happened, some of the team are dead and the interesting characters go off to be written out of character by Jeph Loeb, leaving Rogue.  Rogue promptly decides that she's a big girl too, and is going to kill Magneto by rounding up the Weapon Xers.  Getting Guardian's help she goes to assemble the band for one last hurrah.

Which is good because if you're not going to care about the characters in a comic book, you might as well not care about characters you'd normally not have cared about rather than those you normally do.  If you follow my logic.

The problem with the Ultimate X-Men title I think is was that it started off tight, a retelling of the original six with the other classic characters added in over time.  Keeping it tight to the core idea of the line, that this was meant to be in a more realistic universe, things worked well.  The entire X-Men concept seemed fresh.  Bringing in classic elements, like the Phoenix and not-so-classic ones (like Cable), seemed to de-rail the book.  It's a problem that all of the Ultimate books, except for Ultimate Spider-Man, have had and it's my one hope for Ultimatium that the event takes us back closer to square one.