Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men reaches its penultimate issue, but unfortunately, it's looking increasingly unlikely that he's going to go out with a bang.  As I've said before, I long since lost interest in the whole overused "dark future" concept.  Maybe that's a large part of it, but this storyline just isn't working for me.

I think the problem is that neither the writing nor the art makes me believe in this as a future world, so I really don't care what happens to it.  We've got a bunch of bit part supermen running around, but virtually nothing to tell us what this world is actually like.  The recap pages tell us that humanity has virtually been wiped out by this point (presumably thanks to that extinction gene from early in the Morrison run) and that the new world is based on species warfare as new creatures emerge to take their place.  But that just doesn't come across in the story.  I don't believe in it as a world, and so I don't really care.

Presumably next month's finale is going to do two things - cover the big fight which sets things right, and finally explain (to some extent) who or what Sublime actually is.  Morrison now seems to be telling us that Sublime has been around for millennia, and has been manipulating evolution to ensure that he survives.  The aim seems to be to give the X-Men an evolution themed villain in Sublime, which makes reasonable sense.  We're seemingly dealing with some kind of creature that hops from host to host.  Apocalypse has been suggested, but that would involve a hefty rewrite of his origin - besides which, Sublime's stated motives conflict with Apocalypse's.

I have a sinking feeling that he may be about to exhume That Which Endures (consciously or otherwise, since god knows almost nobody remembers the original storyline).  One of John Byrne's weirdest concepts, That Which Endures was a sentient mutation which claimed to have existed within all living entities since the dawn of life on Earth, and commandeered the occasional body as a vehicle for its group consciousness.  Naturally, it then proceeded to fight the West Coast Avengers.  It's a very Morrison concept, and I can easily see him coming up with it - or something like it - independently.

Or maybe it's just Apocalypse after all.

There's enough here to keep me interested in the answers to those questions, because they feed back into Sublime's involvement across the whole of Morrison's run.  But this present arc isn't engaging me at all.

Rating: C+

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