X-Men: The End begins the first of three six-issue miniseries, in which Chris Claremont wraps up the X-Men Universe.  All of it.

This is subtitled Book One: Dreamers & Demons.  However, in order to preserve my sanity, I'm going to skip the full title and just go with X-Men: The End vol 1 #1, which is what it says in the indicia.  I suppose that means we can look forward in future months to X-Men: The End vol 2 #1 and X-Men: The End vol 3 #1, a prospect I find inexplicably hilarious.

I have my doubts about the whole approach being taken to this book, to be honest.  The End books were originally created with a straightforward idea in mind.  Because all the heroes have to be available for ongoing titles, their stories can never actually end.  The End comics show a possible ending.  It's all about a sense of closure.

For my money, the most successful End books were the Hulk and Punisher one-shots, which stuck purely to the theme and concept of the character, and delivered a simple, straightforward final story that wrapped up the themes of the character by taking them to their logical conclusion.  So, for example, you get the Punisher suicidally crossing a post-nuclear wilderness to wipe out the last people on Earth, simply because they used to be criminals.  Mission complete.  No more criminals.  The end.  All at the level of the high concept.

X-Men: The End, on the other hand, seems to be spending eighteen issues to give us a full scale final act, and tell us where everyone ends up.  To be fair, there's an awful lot of stuff to cover with the X-books, simply because of the volume of characters.  But these detailed alternate futures never stick - they always fall by the wayside soon enough, so Claremont had better have a killer 18-issue story to justify the exercise.

Here's what I want to know from a book called X-Men: The End.  Did they ever achieve Xavier's dream?  That's what the team are about.  That's the purpose of the X-Men.  Did they achieve their purpose and retire contented, or did they fail and die frustrated?  That's what gives the X-Men closure.  Now, if it was up to me, I'd do that story.  And maybe I'd go back later on and do further stories for the individual characters.  But closure for the X-Men, surely, is about whether the team achieved their purpose or not.

There's none of that in this issue.  Instead, Claremont goes soaring off to the fringes of the X-Men's cast by bringing in the Shi'ar Empire and positioning the child of Bishop and Deathbird as his lead character.  To be fair, he couldn't be accused of ignoring other writers' contributions to the mythology - Bishop isn't his character, the relationship with Deathbird was a Steve Seagle storyline, and even Scott and Emma are still together as the story starts, years down the line.  But Claremont seems to be trying to wrap up, not just the X-Men, but everything associated with them - even bits like the Shi'ar Empire which never really had any thematic connection with the X-Men at all.

Hardcore Claremont fans will adore it - it's the tie-up of all major storylines, done his way.  Honestly, though, it does nothing for me whatsoever.  This isn't what I'm looking for from this project.  I don't care about this area of X-Men continuity, nor about any of these characters.  I certainly don't want to see those sodding slavers back again - they've never appeared in a single decent story to date, and they don't give me much encouragement here.

If the idea of Chris Claremont doing an 18-issue wrap up of the X-Men sounds appealing to you, then don't let me put you off, because you'll probably love it.  Everyone else, however, can safely give it a miss.

Rating: C

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