A tried and true way to annoy fans of a series is with a drug metaphor. There you’ll be watching [spoiler elided] perform magic, getting better season after season, even earning a girlfriend out of it, and then suddenly in the sixth season, it turns out that [spoiler elided] has an addiction to magic that must be stopped any any cost, lest lives be destroyed. Or in the Ultimate X-Men, say, there’s Colossus, this big steel guy, but it turns out he’s been doing drugs all along to be strong enough to support his impenetrable skin. And now all of his friends are addicted too, and the ones who aren’t had better step in and save the day! Oh, and also, it’s time to introduce another half-dozen Marvel characters that you won’t be able to care about unless you already know who they are, because heaven knows we certainly don’t have enough time to actually introduce them and find out if they make any sense or should be cared about, before they’re gone again.[1]

It’s too bad, too, because without the rush job, well… I mean, the drug thing still would have annoyed me. Ongoing series of every flavor really need to stop with that shit, because it is never done well. Ever. But, without the rush job and the drug-story allergy, the last couple of pages of climax, dramatic revelation, and cliffhanger would probably have been pretty cool. Instead of feeling excited about what comes next, though, I’m mostly glad that Absolute Power is the last Ultimate X-Men book I have to read.

[1] That right there is the biggest problem with the Ultimate line of comics, in a nutshell. If you’re going to pretend to be shedding forty years of continuity so that new readers can join the fun, then stop letting your stable of writers add in old characters unless they promise to tell me who they are and why I care. Or, better yet, make me care within the confines of the plot. I know that’s not that hard to do.