X-Men: The End praised the scenes featuring Storm as the most compelling, despite not having been a particularly avid fan of that character, and the artwork, saying that the pencils, coloring and storytelling were "all on target", but criticized other aspects of the book, including the characterization, the pacing of the action scenes, and the story, which he felt was neither original nor complete, lacked character insight, and did not serve as a worthy finale to the X-Men. According to one interview with Chris Claremont, "GeNext" is supposed to take place 10 years after the events of "X-Men: The End", although as the
Ultimate X-Men killing Beast, who was killed when a Sentinel attacked the White House during Emma Frost's public disclosure of her school. This made Beast the first dead Ultimate X-Man. As a side note, "Ultimate X-Men" #40 features what Marvel claims to be the first marriage proposal in a comic book letters column, which is answered in "Ultimate X-Men" #44 with a positive response. The third "Ultimate X-Men" writer was Brian K. Vaughan, best known at the time for his work on "". His run was marked by the relative absence of Wolverine as the main character and the re-imagining of second-string