Goodness, the mainstream X-books are getting quiet these days.  One core X-Men book, two miniseries (albeit that one of them is House of M), and an alternate reality title.  In comparison with recent months, this is almost modest.

We'll start off with Exiles, which wraps up the three-part "Destroy All Monsters."  What a strange storyline.

The big idea of this arc is simple.  It's Japanese monster movies, or the best approximation that can be achieved with Marvel Universe characters now that the rights to Godzilla have long since lapsed.  So instead of superheroes, it's a world where Krakoa fights Fin Fang Foom, and the heroes are a bunch of Marvel scientists piloting Red Ronin.  Not really my sort of thing - the whole monster genre has never done it for me - but fair enough.

But with the final chapter, it all goes a bit odd.  In theory, the Exiles' motivation is that they're trying to find the local version of Curt Connors, so that they can use his healing powers to cure the Mimic.  Meanwhile, back at home base, the rest of the cast get a completely unrelated storyline in which Deadpool escapes, leading to the Mimic copying his powers and healing anyway... thus rendering the main story moot.  In fact, such is Bedard's apparent loss of interest that we don't even get to see the final battle between Fin Fang Foom and Krakoa which the story's been building to for the last two months.  We just get a couple of lines of dialogue reporting what happened.

There are a quite a few cute ideas in here - Blink posing as Fin Fang Foom's fairy sidekick to steer him in the right direction, and the Weapon X version of the She-Hulk turning out to be a Texan judge with alarmingly hardline views on capital punishment.  But the main story just sort of peters out, and the B-plot seems to be linked only by the plot device of healing the Mimic.  The arc seems to be pulling in two different directions at once, and failing to come together as a satisfying whole.

Rating: B

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