It's an extremely quiet week, not just for the X-books, but for comics generally.  Perhaps everyone was figuring that there would be enough late-running comics to pad out week five on the August schedule.  Whatever the reason, there's just not a great deal to review, so I'm going to take the cue from the scheduling gods and have a nice light week.

This week's one and only X-book is World War Hulk: X-Men #3, the final issue of an utterly gratuitous tie-in to the big Hulk crossover.  The wider storyline certainly doesn't need this series, and barely manages to justify it.  As you most probably know, the basic premise of the Hulk story is that the Illuminati exiled the big guy to another planet where they thought he wouldn't do any damage.  Instead, he's come back with a whole army in tow, and he's really quite annoyed.  He's especially irritated because he believes that the Illuminati intentionally blew up the ship after he landed, and killed a whole load of innocent locals.

All this gives the Hulk a perfectly good reason to go after the Illuminati members, and an adequate reason to fight any government-sponsored superheroes who get in his way.  But the X-Men are neither, because Professor X was missing when his Illuminati colleagues booted the Hulk into space. 

So instead, the Hulk has to show up at the X-Men's mansion demanding to know whether Professor X would have gone along with the exile plan, if he'd been there.  It's an absurdly flimsy premise for a three issue miniseries.  It certainly looks like the result of somebody desperately casting around for a story idea to fill a World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries that had already been commissioned blind.

But the creators have made the best of it, and their best just about disguises the lousy concept.  Writer Christos Gage is currently producing one of the best team books in the genre with Stormwatch PHD, even though nobody is reading it.  That book is a fun but clever little title, driven by a likeable and well-defined cast.  That approach obviously isn't going to work on a title as stupid as World War Hulk: X-Men, so instead Gage shifts gears.  If it's going to be a big dumb fight, then by god, it's going to be a big dumb fight.

Paying lip service to the notion of a story, Gage has instead written a great big escalating fight, with the junior team in issue #1, the proper X-Men in issue #2, and the entire cast of all the satellite books in issue #3.  Everyone piles on to the Hulk, and the Hulk pummels them to smithereens.  Gage times the big stunts neatly, and spices things up with little character moments and throwaway references to stories from other books, skilfully referencing the X-books' wider mythos so as to give his cannon fodder mutants a degree of humanity that they would never have gained from this story alone.

The remarkable thing is that Gage and artist Andrea DiVito are just about good enough to get away with this.  They embrace the series for what it is - a glorified action sequence spread over three months.  They hammer the idea that the Hulk is unstoppable, and they use every trick in the book to make the mutants seem like people rather than a faceless horde of opponents.  DiVito has sound sensibilities for this kind of thing, and happily fills page after page with enthusiastic punching.  Compare this story to the recent "Quest for Magik" arc in New X-Men, which was really just another extended fight stretched out for several months, and you can see that this book is in a whole different league.

Of course, the absence of a proper story means that the bells and whistles can only take the creators so far, but it's impressive that they got this much out of a concept so feeble.  And there's a token attempt to give the story a proper resolution.  Bizarrely, the Juggernaut's subplot from New Excalibur is advanced, while the Hulk eventually decides to call it a day after Mercury (quite rightly used as in the "innocent" role) points out just how hopeless the X-Men's status quo is right now.  It's not ideal for a Hulk/X-Men series to finish with Mercury, as the voice of reason, pointing out the stupidity of the premise and the awfulness of the X-books' current direction, but it's as good as this book could realistically deliver.

This is a lot better than it has any right to be.  If nothing else, the fact that they managed to produce something legitimately entertaining shows that Gage and DiVito deserve more credit than they get.  They've won me over to seeing this book as a guilty pleasure rather than a waste of trees, and considering that we're talking about World War Hulk: X-Men, that's saying something.

Rating: B+

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