It's Chris Claremont week, as Marvel gives us two X-books, both by him.  And they're really not bad at all.

Mekanix, despite the name, is a Kitty Pryde miniseries.  Kitty always seemed to be one of Claremont's pet characters, and here he picks up the character in the university setting he established for her in X-Men Unlimited a while back.  Unusually for X-Men characters, Kitty has decided to drop out of the X-Men and their associated teams altogether and just go off to do a degree instead.

The plot here is pretty straightforward - Kitty just wants to get on with her life but the anti-mutant loonies are hovering around the campus having somehow or other established that one of the students in her tutorial group is a mutant.  (It's never really made clear how they established this, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume that some sort of explanation will be along in due course.)

Really, though, the series is an opportunity for Claremont to get back to a character he clearly likes, and catch up with another of his discarded creations, Karma.  The series is fairly light on Claremont's writing tics, and for the most part Kitty and Shan both come across as rounded and believable characters.  I always liked Kitty.  I'm always happy to see her when she's being written decently.

Art is from Juan Bobillo and Marcelo Sosa, not names which mean a great deal to me, although I'll go out on a limb and guess they might be Spanish.  They're pretty good - at first glance, nothing too out of the ordinary, but the layouts are very strong and the backgrounds are all well designed.  Unusually, Claremont departs from his conventional text-driven storytelling for parts of this story, and one of the results is an excellent two-page sequence of Kitty and her psychiatrist sitting in silence for an hour which makes good use of a subdued grid layout and repetition of panels.

The downsides: while Kitty having a bar job is fair enough, the rather silly costume she has (which was established back in the X-Men Unlimited story) is just a bit too contrived.  And the villains have a gratingly awkward scene in which one of them stands around going "My god, do you think we might perhaps be wrong", telegraphing his reform a mile off.

Nonetheless, in quality terms this is miles ahead of Claremont's recent work.  It's still Claremont, of course, and if you never cared for his style then you probably won't think much of this either.  On the other hand, if like me you think he just lost the plot in the last few years, you might be pleasantly surprised here.

Rating: B+

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