Writing the X-Axis can be rather irritating during these transitional phases for the line.  While we wait for the dead wood to be cleared and the new titles to begin, there can be weeks like these, where you can almost hear the gentle lapping of water being treaded.

Five X-books, this week.  Two fill-in stories, one miniseries that I've written about two weeks in a row already, and an issue of X-Men Unlimited which seems to be an overflow from Uncanny X-Men.  Can we get on with it so that I can write an interesting review about the creative direction of New Mutants?

Ah well.  On the bright side, we have New X-Men, which produces an excellent issue this month.

We tend to focus primarily on the ways in which Grant Morrison's run on the X-Men differs from those who came before him (ie, Chris Claremont).  But they do have a lot in common - after all, Morrison's been making plenty of use of the soap opera character angles which were the basis of Claremont's formula in the nineties.  And, in these days when everything's meant to be neatly divided up into easily reprintable storylines, it's pretty clear that Morrison is thinking primarily in terms of the ongoing series.  Which means we get long, simmering subplot that finally pay off after months in the background.

This is one of them.  Emma and Scott's relationship has been getting a page here and there ever since last year's annual.  Now Jean's finally found out about it, and this issue gives us the big confrontation.

The clever thing about this issue is the way it plays with your sympathies.  Most readers will start off sympathising with Emma who is, after all, traditionally the morally questionable one, and who's been presented as trying to seduce Scott.  Morrison shows tremendous skill as he inverts the entire thing in the course of what's essentially an extended conversation, leaving Emma as the victim motivated by love, and Jean as an intimidating and faintly irrational bully.

After all, what exactly have Emma and Scott done wrong?  They've thought about committing adultery, but in reality they've barely touched.  But it matters more, because Emma's a telepath, and the key thing about adultery is the betrayal of intimacy.

The attraction of telepathy as a superpower (or magical ability, or whatever) lies in the fact that the human mind is the one part of reality that it's impossible to observe directly.  You might believe somebody loves you, and you might be right, but you can never look into their minds to see for yourself.  The minds of other people can only ever be inferred at one remove.  Unless you're a telepath, in which case you get direct access to everyone around you.

This is all very well as a power fantasy, but pretty much terrifying for everyone around you, since they have no way of knowing whether you're looking at them or not.  They have to take it on trust that you're respecting their privacy.  The potential for abuse and for interference with thought processes - which violates the entire concept of identity - gives the whole thing a very nasty undertone.

And that's at the core of this issue.  Emma's whole persona is about keeping up a public image to conceal what she's really thinking.  Her obsession with maintaining that inscrutable image is neatly signalled by the decor in her office - modernist furniture, Prisoner-style chairs, and images of herself as a pastiche Warhol print.  Emma gets to maintain that degree of inaccessibility while seeing through everyone around her.  But Jean, as the more powerful telepath, can smash straight through that.  And does.

The catch being that Emma really hasn't done anything to merit it.  Emma hasn't done anything unethical, so far as we've seen, in her relations with Scott.  She might have been using her telepathy to achieve intimacy with him, and that might well be seen as a betrayal of Jean, but it's Scott's betrayal, not Emma's.  And that's why Emma ends up coming out of this with the audience's sympathies.  It's a wonderful piece of writing.

This month's artist is Phil Jimenez, who worked with Morrison before on Invisibles.  He's a great character artist, ideal for this sort of stories.  There are some nice flashback sequences where he deliberately echoes the work of earlier artists (specifically John Byrne and Leinil Yu) without losing his own style.  The scene with Emma's family, all heavily redesigned by Jimenez or introduced from scratch, is excellent.

A really, really good issue.  One of the best in the Morrison run, and well worth the long months of build-up.

Rating: A+

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