The X-book schedule remains gleefully erratic, swerving from a handful of books one week to a deluge the next.  Last week, seven X-books.  This week, three.  Next week, eight.  Given they're selling most of these things to the same audience, wouldn't it make sense to smooth it out a bit?

In any event, we're left with an oddball selection of comics for this week - two of the more grounded X-books, and way off at the other extreme, a relaunch of X-Force.

District X is now two thirds of the way through an opening six issue storyline.  In recent years, six issue storylines have started to pop up in all sorts of places where they really don't belong, as pacing for the trade paperback has been allowed to spiral out of control.  A number of recent titles have launched with storylines that just didn't merit that amount of space (and which can't have encouraged many people to jump aboard after issue #1).

Fortunately, District X seems to be an exception.  The ensemble cast have enough going on between them that they genuinely need the six issues.  The focus remains firmly on the Mutant Town inhabitants rather than on Bishop himself - he's there as the police investigator, but the book isn't really about him.  He's got no real relationship with any characters other than Izzy Ortega, and he's serving a plot role as the competent authority figure who's driving the plot forward.

The real stories, however, have been built around the supporting cast - Izzy's partly successful attempts to protect his partner, the NYPD turning a semi-blind eye to an obvious cover-up, the drug storyline, the hapless Toad Boy, and the enigmatic Mr M character.  As we establish this issue, M - or Mercator, to give him his proper name - is a very powerful mutant indeed, who's just been trying to live a quiet, normal life for the last few decades.  He's now decided that it's time he ought to do something with his abilities, but he seems uncertain as to what.  He's certainly not inclined to dress up and play superhero, but he seems drawn both to try and help out in Mutant Town, and by the appeal of actually using his powers and playing god.  He's an interesting character, albeit that his somewhat existential dilemmas wouldn't provide much of a story on their own.

Fortunately they're not required to, because the drugs storyline is the main engine of the arc.  The idea of the drugs turning out to be lethal to humans is perhaps a little contrived (surely this would have been noticed beforehand - how was Jazz ever testing to make sure all of his customers were mutants?).  But it provides a nice cliffhanger ending which gives the series some momentum to go with the character arcs.

Lan Medina provides fill-in art for this issue.  It's consistently good, but the style varies considerably, presumably depending on the inker.  Much of the issue shares the polish of regular artist David Yardin (which is hardly surprising, because regular inker Alejandro Sicat is still around).  Some of the book has been shot from pencils and digitally inked by Avalon, however, and those bits are decidedly rougher.  They're perfectly good as pages in their own right, but they do look unfinished in the context of the rest of the book.

Another good solid issue, anyway.  District X continues to be a pleasant surprise coming out of Reload.

Rating: A-

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