I'm out of town for a week, so it's a choice between writing the X-Axis on Thursday night, or leaving it until next weekend.  Since there's just the two X-books, let's go for the Thursday night option.

And we start with New X-Men.  This issue is the debut appearance of Dust, the Afghan mutant shown on the cover.  Obviously it's no coincidence that Morrison should choose to introduce an Afghan character at this point.  And there's plenty of story potential in Afghan characters, quite aside from the current political events.  It's an interesting country by any standards.

Whatever Morrison has in mind for Dust will have to wait for another issue, however, since her function in this issue is to be either comatose or terrified as the situation demands, to demonstrate her powers, and repeat the word "dust."  All fairly standard set-up material, and also somewhat playing into the "helpless female" stereotype of the region - I suspect deliberately.  We'll see where Morrison's heading with this one.

Meanwhile, most of the issue is spent shuffling assorted subplots into place, what with this being the beginning of the new story arc.  Fantomex turns up again, which is a little unfortunate since he isn't one of the more successful ideas to have turned up in this series so far.  Fantomex runs through his usual routine with Wolverine, and throws in a couple of lines which don't match what he's said before.  It's clearly setting up a plot where Wolverine gets more information about his past at some point down the line, and possibly even bringing back the material from Origin - as if any of that stuff mattered.  I can't say it's an subplot which immediately grabs me.

Over in India, Xavier and Jean foil a hijacking by fixing the terrorists' minds telepathically.  Xavier seems to be getting a bit triggerhappy in his old age when it comes to using his powers to remove unacceptable opinions.  No doubt we're meant to pick up on the hypocrisy in having him alter terrorists' minds so that they will "never again use violence in the service of abstract ideas", bearing in mind that that description applies equally to much of what the X-Men do.

The Phoenix subplot is back as well, and in a nice touch, Jean is now wearing the old yellow-on-green Phoenix logo as a T-shirt under her Quitely-designed uniform.  The Shi'ar turn up to give us the usual routine about the Phoenix being a very bad thing, but this time round they've decided just to let nature take its course and allow the whole mutant race to wipe one another out.  The logic of this is all a little shaky - isn't the Shi'ar's whole thing about the Phoenix supposed to be that it wipes out planets and it'll eventually come for them?

The Mumbai branch of the X-Corporation makes its debut, with the utterly bizarre roster of James Proudstar, Feral and long-forgotten X-Force villain Thornn.  They're still in classic spandex costumes, because they go down well with the Bollywood audience.  Okay, that's funny.  Quite what Feral and Thornn are doing on this roster isn't even touched on - off the top of my head, I could have sworn that Feral was last seen slicing Siryn's throat open, and if Thornn wasn't dead herself, she and Feral homicidally detested one another.  It's not a bad choice of characters as such, but how on earth did they end up in the X-Corporation at all?

This month's guest artist is Ethan van Sciver.  The art's a bit patchy.  Sciver isn't at his most detailed throughout the issue, and there are stretches which just look like generic mid-nineties artwork.  Some of the action sequences are confused, and Jean stopping a bullet with telekinetics ends up a little flat.  It's okay, but van Sciver can do much better.  I suspect fill-in deadlines.

All told, it's a bitty issue, with some interesting ideas and some that don't click quite as well.  Still, it's never less than entertaining, and as a set-up issue, it does succeed introducing ideas with promise for the rest of the storyline.

Rating: B

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