To be honest, this is a week when I'm rather more interested in writing about a raft of new titles than I am in the X-books, most of which are halfway through extended storylines anyway.  But in the interest of maintaining the format - and bearing in mind that all three of the core X-Men titles shipped this week - let's look at them anyway.

New X-Men #144 is the third part of "Assault on Weapon Plus", and I'm a little underwhelmed.   Really, this is a story for Grant Morrison fans rather than X-Men fans; Wolverine and Cyclops hang around the edges while Morrison gives us an issue about Fantomex and the World.  I don't really have a problem with Fantomex, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Morrison find him infinitely more enthralling than I do; and while the World is a perfectly good idea, I've seen it done before, not least by Morrison.

That's not to say that this is a bad issue.  It's perfectly well written, and it does have some great moments, such as Weapon XV's emergence from the Dome.  It's just that it's all about pushing Morrison's pet ideas, and I'm not convinced we're learning a great deal here that we didn't establish last issue.

I'd rather been hoping that we might get to see more of the city inside the World dome, which would have played more to the strengths of artist Chris Bachalo.  Instead, what we get is basically another action issue.  Bachalo is not a good action artist.  At his best, he's a somewhat obscure storyteller with an annoying habit of shoving key information to the background or side of a panel for no desperately good reason.  Ask him to produce pages of action sequences and the result is predictably incoherent.  I love Bachalo's sense of design, but the lack of clarity in his work is a major problem for this kind of story.

It's okay.  It's just retreading ground and not playing to the strengths of the artist.

Rating: B

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