Don't worry, we will not be talking about the war here.  The lead-in time on comics is so long that it takes them months to react to anything.  It's business as usual in the X-books, and we should be seeing the first war reaction comics round about September if we're really lucky.

New X-Men concludes the "Riot at Xavier's" storyline.  Of course, as I've pointed out before, Morrison has been moving away from rigid story arc structures and back towards ongoing, open-ended storylines - swimming against the tide, by today's standards.  So it's probably more accurate to describe this as the last issue in the block that's going to make up the next trade paperback.  It does resolve the riot storyline, but it also uses the fallout to flare up a long-running subplot and segue into the next arc.

In fact, the issue kicks off with an action sequence resolving a stray plot thread from the previous issue - the burning guy running after the bus.  It's a nice little scene, well choreographed by Quitely, although it does seem a bit out of place here.  It's like something that got squeezed out of the previous issue for space, and got included here as an afterthought.

Most of the story, however, deals with the fallout from Sophie's death.  In fact, when I read that story, it didn't really occur to me that she was meant to be dead.  I realise that they didn't want to do a cliched "Oh my god, she's DEAD" scene.  But I've been reading superhero comics for so long that a character needs to be pretty comprehensively dead as opposed to unconscious before I'm going to draw that conclusion without dialogue to back it up.  I've seen way too many false endings for that.

Nonetheless, Sophie's death leads to some great scenes for Emma Frost.  Sophie and her fellow cuckoos were always presented as five mini-Emmas, and that's neatly exploited here to dramatise Emma's self-loathing.  The surviving Cuckoos are bitter about Sophie's death and rather than accepting responsibility for something that she did voluntarily they blame Emma for inspiring her.  And since they're just like Emma, they follow through on that by spitefully trying to hurt Emma as much as possible.

Meanwhile, Emma's own reaction is all between the lines.  She starts off trying to give Sophie a dignified send-off, and while she's clearly shattered by the Cuckoos' rejection, it only takes her a few panels to resume her usual facade.  Morrison reminds us that Emma managed to get the Hellions killed as well, without being too blatant about it, and promptly puts Emma into another mentor relationship with Angel.  It raises an interesting question about Emma's character which has never really been explored all that thoroughly - just why is she so keen on teaching?  What motivates her to keep trying to shape children in her image?  Morrison is at his best here, with plenty of material hinting at the reasons without ever quite making it clear.

It's great, subtle characterisation.  The same goes for her ongoing telepathic affair with Scott, which is brought centre stage for the first time after months of bubbling under as a subplot.  Scott continues to attribute his actions to after-effects of the period when he was possessed by Apocalypse, but it's clearly that he's really just looking for excuses to justify acting in a way he feels is out of his character.  This is a romance subplot between two of the most emotionally distant characters in the book, neither of whom are exactly great at honest communication about their feelings.  That's part of what makes it so interesting.

A really strong, character-driven issue.  Excellent.

Rating: A+

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