According to the schedule, Ultimate X-Men #93 should have been out this week, featuring the conclusion of Robert Kirkman's run.  Well, it didn't show up at my store, so we'll just have to wait until next week for that one.

However, as it happens, this works out rather nicely.  Because I went back to the store to double check that I hadn't simply missed the issue, and ended up with a copy of the X-Men's Free Comic Book Day giveaway, by Mike Carey and Greg Land.  I'm not quite sure what we're meant to call this thing, but the indicia opts for Free Comic Book Day 2008 X-Men, so I suppose that'll have to do.

This issue is actually worth getting.  It's a full-length story which would have made a better than average regular issue.  Now, it's billed as an X-Men story, and in fairness, they do appear in half the issue.  But it's really a Pixie story, where the X-Men show up to help at the end.  Technically, I suppose it also blows the ending of "Divided We Stand", by revealing that the X-Men get back together again.  But if you didn't see that one coming, god help you.

After the closure of the school, Pixie has returned home to a small Welsh village, where there are Strange Things Afoot.  In plot terms, this is straight out of Doctor Who, but there's nothing wrong with that.  People are going missing, but Pixie is the only one who seems to have noticed.  Being a perfectly sensible young heroine, she phones the X-Men for help, and then tries to do her best on her own until they show up.

This is precisely the sort of story you need for Free Comic Book Day.  It's not some obscure deleted scene, or an attempt to explain the series to newcomers.  It's just a solid, self-contained story, steering clear of any complicated history.  It sets out to convince readers that if they buy X-Men comics, they will be entertained.  No more, no less.  There's a bit at the end which (depending on how literally we're meant to take it) might be very important indeed to the wider continuity; but it's a moment that will make equal sense to casual readers.

My main reservation - and it's irrelevant to the casual audience - is that Carey and Land seem to have given Pixie a rather drastic makeover.  Although she's generally been a background character, Pixie does have an established personality and appearance.  Generally speaking, she's one of the younger kids, she's a bit naive, and she's prone to excitable babbling.  Carey is clearly familiar with all this - he gives her a couple of moments of typical Pixie-style behaviour in the course of a full-length story, and he's up to speed on her history.  But he's evidently set out to broaden her range dramatically, and the effect is to turn her into something closer to 1980s Kitty Pryde.

As for Greg Land, he appears to have put a good three years on her age.  Now, the cheap shot here would be to say that Land's favourite sources of photo reference tend to be light on 14-year-old girls for legal reasons.  In fairness, though, I really didn't mind his art on this issue.  It tells the story perfectly well, the characters look good, and the small-town setting is effectively realised.  The real problem with Land's work is that everything tends to look a bit airbrushed and excessively prettified, and that's what he's done with Pixie. 

Now, granted, if ever a character could get away with looking elfin, I suppose Pixie would have to be that character.  But still, the cumulative effect of Carey and Land's tweaking is to produce a character who, but for her wings, name and powers, is all but unrecognisable as the Pixie we've seen before.  Part of me thinks that's cheating slightly; part of me thinks that if Pixie's going to be more than a background character, it's better to reinvent her than to try and develop her from the one-note comic relief she'd (understandably) been  established as.

That aside - good issue.  I'd be very happy if the regular series was like this.

Rating: A

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