The X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover series X4 got off to a dismal start with its first issue.  Issue #2 is a marginal improvement.  The title characters don't fight one another for no reason.  That, specifically, is the marginal improvement.

Otherwise, this is just a tiresome exercise in milking the franchise.  Some of the X-Men and some of the Fantastic Four go up to help a space station.  Conveniently enough, the villains turn out to be the Brood.  Big fight.  That's most of the issue.  But wait!  By a tremendous coincidence, the cosmic rays are awfully high today!  Yes, you guessed it - the ship gets irradiated, and the X-Men get extra powers.  The FF's powers.  Because with all the powers in the world to choose from, clearly they're going to get those four.

That, presumably, is the high concept of the series.  If this is the best plot they could come up with to justify it, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what's still to come.  Power-swapping isn't necessarily a bad idea, if you want to go the Silver Age team-up route, but there's no need to take such a contrived and cumbersome route to get there.

When this sort of schlock appears in an ongoing series because nobody had any better ideas but they needed to shove out an issue anyway, it's perhaps forgivable.  But when a story this dismal and pointless actually receives its own miniseries, you can only wonder what happened to the concept of quality control.  But hell, who am I kidding?  These days, Marvel can't even wrap their heads around quantity control.

Marvel seem bemusingly keen on writer Akira Yoshida, who is also scheduled to write the upcoming X-Men: Age of Apocalypse and Wolverine: Soulbringer miniseries.  On the strength of this nonsense, I'm not looking forward to them in the slightest.  To be fair, he did get much better reviews for Thor: Son of Asgard, so this might turn out to be an anomaly.  But this is just so feeble that I can't summon up the willpower to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Pat Lee's art, which wasn't so bad in the first issue, is flat and uninvolving this time around.  When he has to draw the Invisible Woman and Emma Frost in the same conversation, it's painfully apparent that he can only do one face.

Bad and unnecessary.

Rating: C-

back | continue