I have made mention several times over the past few months that the Marvel Ultimate series has an expiration date that, according to my bookshelf, I seem to be approaching. But it hasn’t felt like that in the depths of the storylines, right? Which is one of the reasons that Cable caught me by so much surprise that it has caused me to rethink the Ultimate X-Men series as a whole. More on that in a sec, but what made me start thinking about the Ultimatum again is how much finality and apocalypticism Kirkman brought to the table this time. There’s this guy Cable, see, and he has come from the future to kill Charles Xavier and thereby prevent said future from ever occurring, probably because it sucks? This is information I have not yet been specifically given, so. All the same, the situation felt like the first pebble of an avalanche, in a way that nothing previously has.

Which I guess ties into what I meant about rethinking the UXM series. Obviously I’ve been fine with the development of Spider-Man. The Ultimates are busy with one nation-threatening event after another, and the Fantastic Four skip jauntily from one sci-fi menace to the next, but neither group has built up much in the way of continuity. (The Ultimates would I think have built more, if only more had been written about them.) The X-Men, though… some I’ve liked, many I haven’t liked very much, but I never really looked at the series as a cohesive unit before, and I have to admit, for all the individual episodes I haven’t cared much about, the whole of it stands together really well. Somewhere along the way, no question, I started caring about these characters. If I’m right about this being the first signpost of things to come, I’m glad it happened here. Spider-Man’s story is too personal for world-shaking events, and the others are too scattered.