Week 2 of Reload, and it's the parade of the second-tier titles.  Not that it was meant to work out like that.  Under the original schedule, Excalibur #1 would have shipped this week.  But because Marvel chose to junk the entire completed first issue (which you can see on Igor Kordey's website, by the way), the book's been shunted back a week.

So instead, District X gets to be the this week's launch title.  This is the second attempt at an ongoing Bishop series, on top of which, he's also starred in three miniseries.  In fact, in retrospect, it's surprising quite how flexible the character has turned out to be.  When he debuted back in 1991, Bishop was almost the archetypal Image character - a heavily muscled gun-toting nutcase.  But he's turned out to have more potential than that.  Getting rid of the early-nineties excesses revealed a reasonably promising character underneath.

Baggage like the Witness and the traitor storyline have been either resolved or quietly brushed aside, leaving Bishop as a much more accessible character.  Strictly speaking, he still has a monumentally fiddly back story.  But all you really need to know is that he's a cop from the future.  Makes matters a lot easier.

In fact, Bishop doesn't turn up until the final panel of District X #1.  It's mainly about establishing the Mutant Town concept, and introducing Izzy Ortega, who's apparently being set up as Bishop's human partner.  It may well be that this is going to end up effectively as an ensemble title, in which case giving the first issue to Izzy makes perfect sense.

The story is really an excuse to go on a tour of Mutant Town and show its inhabitants as the sort of mutants who don't really have powers as such, so much as really annoying mutations that they can't switch off.  It's pretty clear that this is a ghetto, and one with rather unusual problems.  Fortunately, Hine isn't taking the sledgehammer line that we've seen in X-Treme X-Men, where the cops just stand around shrugging their shoulders and being completely ineffective in the face of overwhelming mutant power.  Rather, they're defensive and freaked out by the parade of weirdos they're expected to police, and don't really have a clue what to do with them.

Izzy and his previous partner, Gus, are given a fairly standard relationship - Gus is the older, reactionary type who would really rather be somewhere else, and Izzy is the young liberal trying his best to help out.  This sort of thing can easily be one dimensional, but Hine complicates matters enough to avoid that.  Gus at least seems to be trying to do the job properly, and his feelings of losing control over the district aren't exactly unfounded.  Meanwhile, Izzy is willing to cover up a shooting which, to be fair, wasn't really Gus's fault anyway.

David Yardin and Alejandro Sicat do solid work on the art.  The emphasis is more on making it look like a ghetto than on the mutant side of things, and the designs for the mutants aren't overplayed.  They're pretty good at acting and body language, as well.  It's nicely pitched for the tone of the book.

On occasion, some overripe scripting lets the side down.  "The streets are like a woman"?  I think not.  "Rain was pounding the streets like bad news"?  That doesn't even make sense.

Okay, we've already got NYX, and I have my doubts that there's a market for two tales of inner-city mutant poverty.  Then again, NYX never ships, so it's academic.  The police procedural/superhero crossover market isn't virgin territory either.  Both Powers and Gotham Central are already doing it.  But there's probably room for a third as long as it's done well, and this is a promising start.

Rating: A-

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