"Murder at the Mansion" wraps up in New X-Men, and I'm enormously relieved to see that (despite one rumour I'd heard) it does actually tell us who shot Emma Frost.

Well, sort of.  It opens up more questions by hinting at another bigger villain behind the scenes.  But nonetheless, we do get our answer, and it does make sense.  It's a nicely constructed story, in fact.  If you pause and think about it, the answer that Morrison comes up with is staggeringly obvious.  So obvious, in fact, that it was almost certainly your first thought when you were looking for suspects.  The skill of this story is the way it's been constructed to take you off on a huge wild goose chase so that when it loops back to a perfectly natural answer, it doesn't seem like an anti-climax.

I can see that Morrison's take on Sage is a touch aggravating.  He really goes to town in taking her "computer brain" gimmick literally.  In a sense I prefer this approach - after all, if you don't take it literally, what exactly does it mean in practice?  Nonetheless, the established line is that it's just a rather vague description of enhanced intelligence, and there's no denying that it's a jarringly different approach to the character.  However, it doesn't really matter, because Bishop and Sage are just here to serve an investigator role - the regular cast can't be used because they're all tainted as possible suspects.

A nicely constructed mystery story with plenty of entertaining subplots, and fabulous art from Phil Jimenez.

Rating: A

back | continue