Ultimate X-Men #94 sees the arrival of a new creative team.  Artist Mark Brooks is a familiar figure, but writer Aron Coleite is new to these parts.  He's best known as a contributor to Heroes, although before that, he did a bit of work for Top Cow.

Coleite has the awkward task of filling a few issues before the Ultimatum event gets under way.  In fact, the cover has a big "March to Ultimatum" banner on it, although there's no sign of the story itself leading into a crossover.  Instead, Coleite seems to have just picked an Ultimate X-Men story to tell, and knuckled down to business.

And it's worth stressing that this is indeed an Ultimate X-Men story.  When Mark Millar created this version of the team, for better or worse, he gave them dramatically different origin stories.  There's an obvious temptation for writers to ignore that in favour of doing mix-and-match tributes to Claremont stories of old.  But here, Coleite is doing a story based on Colossus' time as a mobster, a Millar idea which has been downplayed ever since.

Unfortunately, something seems to have gone horribly wrong in the transition from Robert Kirkman's run.  Somewhere along the line, the co-ordination has gone to pot.  So, after leaving for the stars amid much fanfare last issue, Jean is simply back.  Nightcrawler is back with the team.  Firestar has shown up from nowhere.  Actually, you could probably get away with the latter two.  But simply reintroducing Jean without explanation the issue after she left?  Come on.  There are clumsy attempts to cover for it in dialogue, but it still feels a bit amateur hour.

But that aside, it's a reasonably strong start - at least, so long as you're prepared to accept that this Colossus is a totally different character from the original.  Coleite's approach to him makes reasonable sense; he drifted into organised crime after being disowned by his family.  However, more eyebrows will be raised by the idea that this version of Colossus depends on drugs for his strength.  Without them, he's just a guy made of metal; and that's a lot of metal to lug around.

I'm in two minds about this.  I've always thought that Millar's version of Colossus was not an improvement.  The original version worked because he played the honest, wholesome, slightly naive innocent on the team.  Giving him mob connections took away that innocence, and replaced it with a cliché about post-Communist Russia.  Coleite is making a good faith attempt to deal with it here - as well as doing a fairly obvious steroid metaphor - and if you're going to have this sort of thing in Ultimate Colossus' back story, you might as well do something with it.  I'm not convinced that the resulting character is actually an improvement on the original; in a team book, there's a place for nice guys.  But that's hardly Coleite's fault.

Along the way, we also have the introduction of Ultimate Alpha Flight.  It's a reprise of their very first appearances in X-Men, where they kept trying to recapture Wolverine, only with Northstar swapped into the runaway role.

A lot of this issue works, but there are stumbling blocks.  As already noted, there's a grindingly botched transition from the Kirkman run.  On top of that, the story wants us to believe that drug-enhanced mutants are the most terrifying thing ever, but coming right on the heels of a Phoenix story, that doesn't really fly.  And although the cliffhanger might turn out simply to be audacious, it also has the hallmarks of being potentially very silly indeed.

Still, I'll give Caliete the benefit of the doubt for now.  He certainly covers a lot of ground in his first issue, and while I'm not entirely sold on some of these ideas, I can see the possibilities.

Rating: B

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