Brian Vaughan has only two issues left to go on Mystique before getting a promotion up to Ultimate X-Men (albeit for a pre-Singer filler arc).  He's being replaced on this book by Sean McKeever.

Since I've been rather overwhelmingly negative about the Reload stunt, in the interests of balance I should make clear that these seem nice, sensible decisions.  McKeever is clearly a talented writer, albeit one who's always worked on rather marginal titles.  Mystique could be just the sort of mid-table book to raise his profile, and I'm sure he can do well with it.

As for Brian Vaughan, his action plotting has come along tremendously.  This title is basically an action spy series.  It works on the level of an action story, and it has enough intelligent ideas hanging around the edges to give it a little more meat than that, without seeming forced.  This issue, for example, is a fairly stock plot about Mystique and Forge hunting around New York for a missing mutant kid.  But their discussions about Oscar Wilde (and his claim that the basis of all optimism is "sheer terror") complement the plot rather than seeming an artificial add-on.

As is often the case with this series, we've got a fairly self-contained central plot, with the wider storylines moving rather glacially in the background.  The series gets away with that because the individual stories are entertaining in their own right, even if formulaic.  The twist in this issue is fairly predictable, but it's still good fun.

Manuel Garcia and Raul Fernandez take over on art for this arc, and we're back to conventional pencil-and-ink work.  They're a good team, and they've got the right tone for this series - low-power characters like Mystique and Forge work best in a basically realistic setting which can accommodate their powers as something out of the ordinary.

I say this almost every month, but that's because it's true: a good, solid title which delivers a fun story.

Rating: B+

back | continue