It's Chris Claremont week again, although this time round we have Ultimate X-Men to stop him having a complete clean sweep of the X-books' output.  But first, Mekanix, the Kitty Pryde miniseries whose title remains inscrutable.

Mekanix #1 was really quite a good read, since it was a largely character-driven piece which had a nice take on Kitty and avoided many of Claremont's customary writing tics - for one thing, it was notably light on dialogue.  Issue #2 isn't quite as successful.  It's largely a disaster-recovery story, with Kitty doing her hero routine when her professor's vaguely described experiments are sabotaged by anti-mutant terrorists, causing a nice big explosion.

On the plus side, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that side of the plot come to a head so quickly.  From the first issue, I'd expected the arc about the terrorists trying to interfere with the experiments would be the theme of the entire series; instead, that particular plot device is pretty much tied up this issue as the entire building is obliterated and the plot moves on to investigators trying to work out how the nasty muties figure into it all.  Always nice when the predictable and obvious plot turns out simply to be the Act 1 set-up, so I'm interested to see where Claremont's heading with this.

On the other hand, that does leave about half of this book to consist of Kitty being heroic, in a disaster-recovery scene covering some sixteen pages of the story.  Of course, that does serve to advance the plot in various ways (it gives Kitty an excuse to meet up with two other mutants, and exposes her as a mutant to the rest of her group), but at around two thirds of the book, it does drag a bit.  Kitty really doesn't need quite so much space devoted to what's essentially a power demonstration scene.

I'm still interested in the overall storyline, but this feels a bit slow.

Rating: B

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