Grant Morrison winds up the Weapon XII storyline in New X-Men #130.  This is a rather frustrating one.  There have been some very good ideas in this arc.  But there have also been some rather dull ones, and Weapon XII himself is firmly at the top of that list.  The "everything he touches becomes an extension of him" idea isn't all that new - hell, Kurt Busiek did it in Avengers a year or so back, and at least the villain there had a personality.  This version of the idea is just a generic "living weapon" type, and it doesn't really do much for me.

Then there's Fantomex.

Fantomex is based on the French pulp fiction character Fantomas, which is very obvious when somebody points it out.  But that still relies on the reader being at least vaguely familiar with a character who, to most English speaking readers, is spectacularly obscure.

Even the most cursory reading about Fantomas makes it clear why Morrison likes him.  There's plenty of themes from the original Fantomas stories which play strongly into Morrison's own recurring themes.  He would have been an ideal character to use in Invisibles, for example.

But this is not Invisibles.  This is New X-Men, and what we're seeing here amounts to a detour in which the X-Men stand around checking their watch while Morrison does a homage to a completely unrelated story that has little or nothing to do with this book.  Don't get me wrong, I quite like Fantomex as a character.  I can see that there's some story potential in there.  But he's got nothing to do with this book, and the result is a story that awkwardly shoe-horns him in regardless.

There are some entertaining moments in this story (although also a couple of horrible sequences, such as M inexplicably claiming that there were no passengers on the train when there have been plenty of them shown on panel over the last two issues).  But as a whole, it just doesn't come together.

Rating: B-

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