It's a nice quiet week for the X-books, with just one issue hitting the shelves.  In fact, it's a quiet week generally, so this should be a relatively brief X-Axis.  Besides, I'm bracing myself for next week, when Marvel is shipping seven X-books, including an anniversary issue, a crossover, and two new titles. 

Marvel have claimed in the past that they put great effort into their scheduling, and try particularly hard to ensure that they don't have more than one of the X-Men monthlies shipping at the same time.  (That'd be why three of them are coming out next week, then.)  Given the nonsensical schedules that they've been running for most of this year, quite honestly, I find that claim difficult to take seriously.

Anyway, this week's one and only X-book is the X-Men: Endangered Species one-shot.  In theory, this is an important book.  It's the lead-in to the "Endangered Species" back-up strips, which in turn lead into "Messiah Complex."  In other words, it's the prologue to a crossover which is the prologue to a crossover.  Welcome to 1993.

But at least in the early nineties the X-books had a sense of direction, something that's been singularly absent for the last few years.  The X-books are in a deep malaise at the moment; at this stage, virtually any sign of a plan or direction, however editorially-imposed, seems almost welcome.

Of course, that was what M-Day was meant to provide.  What actually happened was that the writers went through the motions for, ooh, up to a month before paying lip service to it and getting back to the stories they really wanted to tell.  This should never have been allowed; if you're going to do a story like M-Day, you insist that it's followed through.  If you're not prepared to impose it on your writers, then you don't do it all.  The route Marvel chose was nothing short of disastrous.

Which brings us to Endangered Species.  When you bear in mind what it's supposed to be doing, it's a very strange book indeed.  The upcoming back-up strips apparently revolve around the Beast searching for a way to save mutantkind from extinction.  Fair enough.  The one-shot, however, doesn't have much to do with that.

The story sees members of the X-Men, X-Factor and the New X-Men turning up at the funeral of a random mutant boy who has died in a car accident.  It seems that they're now in the habit of attending every mutant funeral, even if it's somebody completely unconnected, simply to mourn the decline of their species.  Now, this is a nice idea as far as it goes.  From there, however, the story amounts to various characters talking with one another about M-Day, and generally agreeing that it kind of sucks.

In fairness, individually these scenes are very good.  One of Mike Carey's key strengths is to humanise the characters and bring the story down to earth.  He also has a go at sealing off some of the obvious questions that leap off the page: why isn't anyone attempting a breeding programme, and how does this fit with all those future timelines where there were tons of mutants?  The answers aren't altogether satisfactory - are we saying that mutants can't breed with normal humans any more?  That the mutant gene is now recessive?  And Bishop's timeline isn't much of a concern because we know it's an alternate future - it was averted when Jean Grey didn't get killed back in Onslaught: X-Men over a decade ago.  Which was a fairly big deal at the time.

But still, Carey covers these points as well as he can, and he's well served on art by Scot Eaton.  Faced with an issue of people in suits talking, Eaton plays it straight and understated, without becoming staid.  It's a good effort on a script that's understandably short on big visuals.

However, there are still fundamental problems.  Weirdly, this story doesn't lead anywhere.  Nothing changes.  Nobody is inspired to do anything.  Quite simply, the plot doesn't start.  We don't even get a panel of the Beast deciding to look into this M-Day thing - apparently he's been working on it already and run out of ideas.  It reads more like an epilogue than a beginning.

The central difficulty for Carey (although it isn't his fault) is that it's simply too late for this story.  The inciting event in this plot is M-Day.  That ought to be nice and simple.  M-Day happens, the mutants' world is turned upside down, they embark on a quest to set things right.  That's your plot driver, right there.  They don't have to succeed - but if we're expected to believe that they care, we have to see them try.

What actually happened is that the X-Men did nothing about M-Day for over a year, and Carey is faced with the task of dragging the plot out, dusting it off, and convincing us that, honestly, it's a recent event that's fresh in everyone's mind.

Ultimately, that seems to be the intended goal of Endangered Species - not to advance the plot at all, but simply to remind us that it's there and to convince us that, eighteen months of nothingness notwithstanding, the characters really do care about it.  On a metatextual level, it also has to persuade us that the creators care about it, and that it's a storyline worth investing in.  Because, let's be clear about this, the way in which the aftermath of M-Day was handled has pretty much killed the plot stone dead.  It sparked no worthwhile storylines, it led to no interesting ideas, and nobody even seemed vaguely concerned about having it reversed - except for Quicksilver, who's off in a satellite title.

The funeral setting is appropriate, because Carey and Eaton's job in this issue is to breathe life into a corpse.  To some extent they succeed - at least everyone finally seems to care.  But the issue was also meant to serve as a lead-in for the upcoming "Endangered Species" back-up strips, and on that level, it fails badly.  It doesn't even hint at places where the story might go from here, let alone entice you to pick up the next chapter.

Still, this plot is such a catastrophe that the book deserves some credit for getting it more or less back on the rails.  But there's a long way to go. 

Rating: B

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