It would be very easy for New X-Men #140 to derail into pastiche. 

A very unpopular character has been murdered in a great big country house.  Bishop and Sage, have been called in to interview everyone and solve the crime.  In other words, it's a drawing room murder mystery of the sort that Agatha Christie used to specialise in.  Obviously, this issue has a nod to that genre - it's essentially just a string of interviews with Bishop and Sage putting the details together.

Agatha Christie's novels have a tendency to be exercises in puzzle-solving, where the challenge is for the reader to work out the ending before the solution is given in the final chapter.  There's certainly an element of that here, and the signs point towards the Stepford Cuckoos, who are the only interviewees to give manifestly false answers.  Which means, traditionally, it can't be them because that would be far too obvious.  That also probably gets the Beak off the hook.

The story works because Morrison doubles up these scenes as a series of well-written vignettes with the characters.  Plus, for a change of pace, we get the story from Bishop and Sage's perspective.  This is the first time Morrison has used these characters from X-Treme X-Men.  They're an obvious choice - while I'm not wild about the retconning of Bishop from a paramilitary psycho into a normal police investigator, it was pulled a couple of years back now, so Morrison might as well run with it.

X-Treme X-Men tends to play off New X-Men and explore the differences of approach to the characters.  Morrison is more interested in playing with the characters themselves; although there are references to Bishop and Sage's last visit to the mansion, there's no mention of the philosophical schism between the X-Men and their splinter faction.  However, Bishop and Sage fit neatly into Morrison's style.  Sage in particular has one of those vaguely defined and largely meaningless powers (what exactly is a "computer brain"?) that could practically make her a Morrison invention.  In fact, Morrison takes her power almost 100% literally here, which isn't quite the approach that Claremont's taken to her - although if she only has a metaphorical computer brain, that makes it even less clear what her powers are supposed to entail.

Another good issue, which pulls off the murder mystery story without crossing the line into parody.

Rating: A

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