Mystique gets a new creative team for Reload, with Sean McKeever taking over the writing and Manuel Garcia on art.

McKeever was responsible for two of the Tsunami books, Sentinel and Inhumans.  They had two things in common - they got pretty good reviews, and virtually nobody read them.  Sentinel is being given a second lease of life in digest format, but nonetheless, both titles were axed within a year.

Still, Marvel have obviously realised that McKeever's a good writer who simply needs a better vehicle.  Mystique, a fairly solid mid-table performer, seems about right. 

There's no drastic change in style here, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of readers hadn't even noticed the change.  McKeever is evidently comfortable with the direction set down by Brian K Vaughan, and the format remains firmly in place.  Xavier gives Mystique her missions, she trots off to perform them while grumbling cynically about the whole thing.  It's very much a plot-driven book based around the missions, with a few subplots simmering in the background to provide a bit of continuity.

For this arc, the mission involves DermaFree, a skincare company who've been testing their products on captive mutants.  Presumably the idea is to play off both the mutant rights angle and all the stuff about physical appearance which goes with having a shapeshifter as your lead character.  To be honest, McKeever overplays it a bit, having DermaFree's owner Helena Carlson blithely dismiss mutants as being on the level of guinea pigs. 

Playing it as an animal rights angle doesn't really work, because mutants are self-evidently of normal human intelligence.  That makes it faintly absurd for Carlson to adopt that position, and also undermines any analogy that they're trying to draw with animal testing.  The whole point of an animal rights debate is whether they have rights despite not having human levels of intellect, so if McKeever really is trying to make some point about animal rights rather than just setting up Carlson as a bigot, the analogy is fundamentally flawed.

Garcia has worked on this title before, and although this issue looks a little bit rougher than some of his earlier work, the standards are generally maintained.  He does a rather good grotesque shapeshifting panel, and some excellent action sequences.

Oh, by the way, the language in the opening scene is Czech.  I'm a little confused as to why, given that the scene is set in Salzburg, where they speak German.  But maybe that'll become clear.

On the whole, this is a fairly straight continuation from what we've seen before on this book, with no radical departures from the new creative team.  The existing audience will be happy, and it's a perfectly good jumping on point.

Rating: B+

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