It says something for Marvel's mentality these days that they could look at a miniseries called Endsong and think to themselves, "You know, this cries out for a sequel."  But they did, and so Greg Pak is back with X-Men: Phoenix - Warsong.

To be fair, X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong did end by setting up this series, more or less out of nowhere, in the closing pages.  Endsong was a strange series, which seemed to start off with some fairly clear ideas in mind, and ended up getting sidetracked into a cryptic final act that really just hit the reset button and put everything back where it started.  Rumour had it that the story was originally meant to be a lot more definitive about writing Jean Grey out forever - only in superhero comics could a whole miniseries be needed simply to establish that a character was literally dead and buried wasn't coming back.  Whether or not this is true, it's certainly plausible in the light of the original.

Despite its failings, though, Endsong was still a good character piece with a very strong first half.  Warsong, on the other hand, seems to have a much hazier idea of what it's trying to achieve.  As foreshadowed at the end of the last issue, the three surviving Stepford Cuckoos are now linked with the Phoenix.  This issue, the Phoenix power emerges, the Cuckoos go slightly nuts, and the X-Men basically run around panicking.

There's no Jean Grey in this series at all, and to be fair, Marvel were fairly clear about that in promoting the book.  It's a Phoenix miniseries, about the Phoenix Force itself.  But the Phoenix has never been a desperately interesting character in its own right.  It was never meant to be; it's merely the byproduct of a retcon whose primary purpose was to bring Jean Grey back to life and punt everything Phoenix-related into the long grass.  Later stories actually dealing with Phoenix tend to be a bit of a slog.

Warsong sidesteps many of those problems by more or less ignoring the Phoenix's past history and doing a story about the Stepford Cuckoos.  They've been around a good few years now as memorable background characters, and it's fair to say the time has come to put them centre stage for a story.  Pak's basic idea is that the Phoenix splits the girls up by favouring one over the other, and poor Celeste gets marginalised.

I'm not sure how well that idea really works.  We've already seen one of the Cuckoos go rogue (Esme, who turned on the X-Men altogether during Morrison's New X-Men run), so it's surely not that novel an experience for them to be driven apart.  Still, at least it's an attempt to get away from the usual tendency to write the Cuckoos as one character with three bodies.

The last series had art from Greg Land, in his typically airbrushed style.  This time round it's Tyler Kirkham and Sal Regla, as part of Marvel's co-production deal with Top Cow.  It's good but not great - the storytelling is sound enough, but there's something rather cluttered and claustrophobic about the layouts.  Still, his Cuckoos are suitably creepy, which is the main point.

Not a bad start, all told.  As with the first series, Pak has taken a rather simple Phoenix story and used it as a springboard for some interesting character material.  And that's the skill with this sort of thing.

Rating: B+

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