The four-issue X-Men: Fairy Tales miniseries concludes with a thoroughly baffling final issue. 

After three issues of fairy tales with the X-Men nailed onto the side, this is something quite different.  It's a bunch of X-Men characters transplanted to New Orleans, with Gambit and Bishop as cops, and Rogue working as a medium.  And there's a local version of the Hellfire Club.

Quite what any of this has got to do with fairy tales, I haven't the faintest idea.  Cebulski describes it as a "Southern ghost story", but isn't that another genre altogether?  Anyhow, if there's some reference to a particular story here, it's flying way over my head.  What we get, in practice, is a fairly generic story about New Orleans where every few pages somebody stops to talk about fairy tales and try to persuade us that they figure into the story somewhere.  (And it's not even subtle.  "That was like something right out of a storybook."  That kind of thing.)

At least with this one there's some genuine sense of the X-Men being transferred to another context, whereas previous issues mainly just re-told old folk tales using some X-Men characters as window dressing.  Artist Kei Kobayashi also has some impressive pages in here - the distorted and elongated bodies aren't really to my taste, and the perspective is oddly flat at times, but there are moments of real energy when the linework loosens up.

But judged as a story, it seems to be going through the motions without ever being entirely clear of what it's trying to achieve.  It's not bad, exactly, but the aim of the whole thing is mystifying.  Where "Kitty's Fairy Tale" actually said something about the characters and how Kitty saw them (and was played for laughs), X-Men: Fairy Tales seems to just be hunting for spuriously tenuous connections between the X-Men and folk stories.

Rating: C

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