Okay, we're five issues into X-Men: The End, and this is getting silly.

You might have hoped that by issue #5 of the six-issue Book One, some sort of point, direction or plot might be emerging.  Heavens no.  There's no room for a point when Chris Claremont is trying to shoehorn every character in the history of the X-books into the title.  I can honestly say that, five issues in, I really don't have a clue what is going on here, why I'm supposed to care, or what the point is supposed to be.  And that's not good.

This issue... oh, god, I don't care.  I really don't care.  I've just read it again to try and work out what the hell is happening, and it doesn't help greatly.  Various Warskrulls running around.  Some people are attacked by other people who we haven't seen before in this storyline.  Other people are attacked by Warskrulls.  Gambit might be a traitor.  But he might not.  Madelyne Pryor, Stryfe and Genesis turn up at the end.  Genesis, for christ's sake!  Cable's adopted son from a future timeline!  If we're going to start including characters as pointless as him, we're going to be here all year.

Oh, hold on.  We are going to be here all year, aren't we?  Eighteen bloody months, in fact.

The book is hopelessly cluttered, with any sense of direction or momentum smothered under a deluge of trivial characters.  The Phoenix subplot which started the series seems to have been shunted entirely to the sidelines.  We've had two issues of largely incomprehensible fighting, and to even begin to decipher the plot takes far more effort than it's worth.

This is a dreadful comic.  It takes a certain warped skill to produce an eighteen issue miniseries which is still too crowded, and it tends to suggest that there are fundamental defects with this series at the most basic conceptual level.  More to the point, though, it just isn't remotely entertaining.

Rating: D+

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