And finally, X-Men: The End comes back for its second volume.

At long last, I'm finally getting some sense of where this story is meant to be going.  Phoenix comes back, the Warskrulls wipe out the Institute and various satellite X-types, and the survivors band together as the X-Men to do something about it.  This would have been all well and good, if it had happened in issue #2 of the first volume.

The reason it couldn't happen in issue #2 is because Claremont has allowed a fundamentally straightforward storyline to become utterly bogged down in suffocating detail, in an attempt to give every single character a speaking part; and the series is drowning in subplots that only serve to distract from the main action.  What the hell was the point of Bishop and Deathbird's kid, for example?  The story seems to have moved on and virtually forgotten about her.

Thinning the cast has helped somewhat, and at least there's finally some semblance of direction.  But the story is still juggling far too many subplots to build any momentum.  And ultimately, I'm still not interested in the threat here.  The Warskrulls?  Who cares?  The X-Men aren't about alien races; that stuff was only ever a bolt-on to let them rush off and do a bit of space opera in between the important stuff that really gets to the heart of the concept.  They should barely merit a cameo in a book that's supposed to be the big final X-Men story, yet somehow they're out there front and centre as the main villains.  It's not a good choice.

Northstar dies.  Again.  Third time this month.  It really, really sucks to be Northstar.

A step up, anyway; at least there's some sort of shape to it now.  But that still leaves plenty of other problems to sort out.

Rating: C

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