This week also sees the final issue of X-Men: Phoenix - Warsong, and boy, was this book terrible.

I can't imagine how this went so badly wrong.  Greg Pak also wrote the last Phoenix miniseries, Endsong, and that was perfectly good.  A bit of a garbled ending, admittedly, but overall it held up nicely.  This, in contrast, is a catastrophe of epic proportions.

The story involves the three Stepford Cuckoos falling under the Phoenix's influence, something that was set up (by editorial edict) at the end of the last series.  The Cuckoos are then revealed as creations of the Weapon Plus project using Emma Frost's DNA, who were sent to infiltrate the X-Men - essentially consistent with what we've seen before.

And from there it's all downhill, disastrously so.  We get a thousand extra Stepford Cuckoos in tubes, as if that sort of storyline has ever made a character stronger.  We get pages of pointless fighting at the World.  We have a character called Agent Oh wandering around contributes so little to the plot that you almost have to wonder whether the story was being rewritten on the fly.  And we have an ending that defies belief.

Brace yourself for this: the Phoenix destroys all the Stepford Cuckoos apart from the original three.  Why?  Because they were created to destroy mutants.  But hold on, weren't the originals created to destroy mutants too?  Shh.  Don't ask awkward questions.  And then, the three survivors all absorb one third of the Phoenix into their hearts - their physical hearts, mind - which have now turned permanently to diamond, in a power they've never previously mentioned.  This will, somehow, contain the Phoenix, even though earlier in the issue we were told that the three of them couldn't contain the Phoenix.  And, for a supposedly dramatic flourish, we finish with the news that the three surviving Cuckoos no longer have emotions.

Because their hearts have turned to diamond, you see.

No, really.  Because their physical hearts have turned to diamond, they don't have emotions any more.

Wow.

I've said before that there are several types of really bad story.  There's the really bad story that has a decent premise but botches it in the execution.  You can see how those come about.  There are stories which were clearly botched by circumstances - mega-crossovers, or last minute rush jobs.  Those are understandable.  And then there are stories like this, which are so lacking in anything even tangentially resembling a good idea that you can only gawp at them and wonder what on earth the creators were thinking.  How did this ever seem like a good idea?  A thousand clones of the lead character, and some nonsense about hearts of diamond?

It doesn't even have especially good art.  Tyler Kirkham, on loan from Top Cow, is at best a competent practitioner of their house style.  To his credit, he tells the story clearly enough.  But it's not memorable to look at.  It's not even in the league of Marc Silvestri's cover - which is at least a striking image, even if those sashes are so low down on the Cuckoos' hips that they end up looking like the world's most invitational miniskirts.

This series is an outright disaster, which has done nothing but damage three perfectly viable characters, and saddle Emma Frost with a thousand dead clone daughters, while failing to be entertaining in the process.  Dire.

Rating: D

back | continue