Rounding off this week's X-books, X-Men: The End.  Regular readers will have realised that I lost interest in this book long ago.

We're midway through the series now, and there's still no sign of a point.  The problem is pretty clear by now.  Even though the plot has settled down to just about make sense, there's no discernible theme to any of this, and certainly nothing that seems to be a sensible plot for the final X-Men story. 

The Shi'ar, the Brood, the Warskrulls, obese extra-dimensional slavers... these characters are only part of the X-Men mythos because Claremont fancied the idea of doing some fantasy and space opera and worked them into the book he happened to be writing at the time.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but they're hardly key to the X-Men concept.  The big ideas of anti-mutant sentiment and outsider community, which were so essential to the success of Uncanny X-Men under Claremont in the seventies and eighties, are largely marginalised to a subplot about Kitty Pryde running for mayor of Chicago (in a campaign that has thus far taken place exclusively off panel).

The irony is that Claremont already wrote a perfectly good X-Men: The End story over twenty years ago - "Days of Futures Past."  Now there was a story with genuine resonance for the themes of this book, not to mention a concept that influenced the book for years after.  You only have to put the concise, concept-driven, two-issue DoFP next to the bloated mess of X-Men: The End to realise that there's simply no comparison.  One had a point.  The other does not.

This issue, Deathbird's daughter wanders around a spaceship and gets bitten by the Brood.  And really, who cares?

Rating: C-

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