Ultimate X-Men #1-25

Ultimate X-Men #1-25
After way too long, I finally decided to get back to the beginning on this series. I had been giving it a miss for all this time because of the lame excuse that it wasn't standard Marvel continuity, and realized after a while that that was exactly the point! It frees writers to write characters that they find interesting without having to be mired in decades of backstory, and I therefore began reading Ultimate X and Ultimate Spidey several months back. But now, as I'm finally beginning to enjoy these stories for what they are, I realize just how much I missed out on at the beginning. So I went back to the first issues to give them a read, and for the most part, I haven't been disappointed. Sure, there were some lower points in the series, such as the Weapon X storyline where I kept feeling like I was missing pages, even though it was so overly decompressed; the short run of Bachalo on the Proteus storyline wasn't too awful when he was doing conversation scenes, but the man can't draw action sequences to save his life; Kaare Andrews guest stint wasn't too bad either, but displays either a lack of caring or a lack of understanding as to the basic proportions and contours of the human face - although honestly, sometimes it was sort of cute. But whenever Kubert was drawing it was wonderful. I could see him experimenting here and there with the look and feel of the series as it progressed, and it felt like his creative process was opening up for me. A great feeling, I must say. And Millar's writing is pretty good when he doesn't have any continuity to mess up. Since his style has been to take whatever characters he's writing and just write them as he sees fit, without feeling the need to be burdened by piddling concerns such as continuity or backstory, it helps when he can create the characters basically from scratch. Unlike much of the work he's done elsewhere in the mainstream Marvel universe, this work doesn't suffer for that conceit.
And I always love seeing the Kuberts' art on anything.
Overall, this series is a very solid GOOD, bordering on very good, but for the few weak patches noted above. Since Andrews provided the art on issues 23 and 24, that also brought the overall ranking down as well, because although some of his stuff is cute, it really slows down the story's pacing and makes it altogether too easy to skip pages...whereas artists like Kubert make you want to see each and every panel in sequence, as his stuff is just so darn beautiful.
Anyways, that's my post for today. Scott Tipton told me to update my site daily, as that's how he developed such a following, so, not to disappoint, I'm endeavoring to do so. Tell me if there's anything in particular you'd like me to write about.