Now here's something we haven't seen in the X-books in quite a while - intertitle continuity.  New X-Men #13 devotes an issue to characters reacting to the death of Northstar in Wolverine #25, and the theft of his body in Wolverine #26.

This sort of thing used to happen all the time in the mid-nineties.  The plus side was that it actually made events feel important.  If events happen, and characters who ought to be affected show no reaction at all, then it makes them seem trivial.  On the other hand, the big failure of the mid-nineties was to have plots which jumped psychotically from one title to another, making it difficult to predict where a given thread was going to be resolved, and impossible to read just one title and understand the plot.

New X-Men #13 gets the balance right.  It's unnecessary to read Mark Millar's Wolverine to follow the story, because we get an opening scene written in the margins of Wolverine #25, and some unavoidable exposition is minimised by simply using a page to repeat a key scene from Wolverine #26.  That allows everyone to get on with the real point of the issue, which is characters mourning Northstar.

To be honest, this is still a slightly unnatural fit for the book.  Although Northstar was a teacher at the school, and the cast would obviously be familiar with him, he's not been used as a major character in this title.  One suspects that a big reason for doing this story is to help out the title's flagging sales with a Wolverine crossover.  (Shame they didn't promote the tie-in on the cover, really.)  Still, even if Northstar himself isn't a major character in this book, there's still a valid story to be done in having the cast react to any of the the teachers at their school being violently killed by one of the X-Men.

So we have a suitably awkward scene with Karma introducing herself to Northstar's trainees as his replacement.  Julian gets to show his sympathetic side to Sofia, which leads us to the old standard "he acts differently around his friends" idea.  (It's a cliche, but at least one that's rooted in reality - and one that the X-books haven't done very often.) 

Really, this isn't an issue about Northstar at all.  There's no lengthy recollections about his time in Alpha Flight, for example, although Sasquatch makes a token cameo.  Instead, it's a story about the kids reacting to his death, which is why it works as an issue of New X-Men.  As is often the case with this book, it's arguably trying to fit in more characters than there's really space for.  But for the most part, it works.  And it's a better send-off for the character than randomly stabbing him in an issue of Wolverine.

Rating: A-

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