Free Comic Book Day is, apparently, a rather expensive exercise for stores outside the USA.  Not many British stores take part, and certainly none of the ones in my town.  So if you're looking for a review of this year's offering from Marvel, X-Men/Runaways, then you'll have to look elsewhere.  From the sound of it, I'm not missing much.

Sticking with the regularly scheduled output, then, we're left with a couple of minor miniseries being tied up.  First up is Sentinel Squad O*N*E, presenting the thrilling origin of a bunch of characters nobody appears to care about in the slightest, let alone any of the other X-Men writers.  From the way Sentinel Squad O*N*E have been written since their debut in Decimation, it seems the idea was that the Squad would show up and form an uneasy relationship with the X-Men.  O*N*E as a whole can't be trusted, but the Squad is led by ex-mutant Alexander Lexington, who is basically decent.

Now, in theory, there's nothing wrong with this.  In practice, nobody can be bothered doing anything with it.  Chris Claremont has at least made a good faith attempt to work it into stories, but it never actually plays any part in his plots.  Everyone else just kind of ignores them.  Even X-Men: The 198, which is entirely about the surviving mutants' relationship with O*N*E, has treated the Sentinels as generic guards.  One of them got killed off in Deadly Genesis, but nobody noticed.

Fundamentally, then, we have no reason to care about the Sentinel Squad, since they might as well be a bunch of random grunts for all the difference it makes.  That leaves John Layman and Aaron Lopresti in serious difficulties with their origin miniseries.  Again, in theory, you can see what Layman is trying to do here.  He's building up the idea of Lexington as the deserving leader who was kept down by bigotry, until M-Day removed his powers and left the way clear for him to take the job he deserved.  This is all well and good, but since nobody is actually doing any stories about the internal politics of O*N*E, it doesn't greatly matter how they got to this point.  Through no fault of his own, Layman ends up writing five issues of set-up for a story that only exists in the editors' minds.

Even on that level, it's competent rather than particularly exciting.  The book has done a reasonable job of fleshing out Lexington and Slayton, but the actual story is a bit ropey.  Sentinels fighting cyborg dinosaurs really ought to work, but came off very flat.  This issue, featuring the Sentinel Squad fighting the remants of Cassandra Nova's Sentinels, also never really comes to life.  Part of what's missing is that the Sentinels have never seemed particularly effective; they're either smashing trivial opposition, or running into massive problems against what ought to be token resistance.  I just don't buy them as any kind of credible threat, and after this many months, that's a real problem.

An average book, held back by the X-books' general failure to follow through properly on the Sentinel Squad concept.

Rating: B-

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