I was rather fond of the first X-23 miniseries, which spent six issues obstinately refusing to make its lead character into a normal human being. 

If anything, it established X-23 as somebody so fundamentally broken and brainwashed that the real question was whether there was any actual personality underneath it all.  She's a different sort of enigma from Wolverine.  For him, the questions are about where he comes from.  With X-23, it's about her personality.

However, I was decidedly less impressed when writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost took over New X-Men and spent their first year on a one-dimensional killing spree.  So I was a little hesitant approaching this series.  But this is more like it.  It's a return to the themes of the original series without just doing a straight retread.

The original book ended with X-23 escaping and killing her "mother."  This series picks up immediately afterwards as X-23 fights off the final attempts to recapture her, and then flees to San Francisco, where she turns up on her aunt's doorstep and offers herself up as a rather strange family member.  This is precisely the story that needed to be done with X-23 at this stage - one where she goes off and tries to function in the real world.

Mind you, lest anyone think they had this clearly planned out during the first series, we also get some flashbacks to her training which retroactively insert a new villain.  Somebody she didn't kill in the first series, you see, and who she can fight again in the sequel.  Kimura seems a bit generic in her first appearance, but I'll give them a bit of leeway there, since otherwise they're on the right track.

Art this time comes from Mike Choi and Sonia Oback, on loan to Marvel as part of their programme of co-operation with Marc Silvestri's Top Cow studio.  And it's good stuff.  To be sure, you can see why they'd fit in with Top Cow, but they're not doing the house style.  They deliver some surprisingly physical action sequences, and while there's a slight problem with overly similar women, at least they can act.  It's very pleasing on the eye.

I was starting to worry about these writers after their first year on New X-Men, but this - combined with a strong issue of the parent title this week - is winning me back round.

Rating: A-

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