It's another quiet week for the X-books, with just two titles, both in mid-storyline.  Since we're not exactly overburdened with big news releases, I might as well review them anyway.

New X-Men #38 is, nominally, the first part of "Quest for Magik", a four-part arc featuring the return of Illyana Rasputin.  In reality, it's part two of five - last issue was billed as a prologue but also features vast, sweeping chunks of vital plot.  Quite why they're billing it in this way, I don't know.  There hasn't been a noticeable trend for sales to go up on the first issue of a new arc.

The story doesn't have to worry about the mechanics of bringing Illyana back.  That was all covered during the House of M crossover arc, where Illyana was one of the characters brought back to life when the Earth was transformed.  She teleported away before it got turned back, so that's the boring bit covered.  Now they just have to work out what to do with her.

Magik hasn't been a regular character in the X-books since the late 1980s.  I'm a little sceptical about how many of today's readers necessarily care about her one way or the other.  Readers who remembered used to lobby vociferously for her return, but that seemed to fade away a good few years ago.  Personally, I'm not at all convinced that there's a need to bring her back. 

It seems to me that the existing storyline worked just fine - she gets corrupted by Belasco, she fights back to overcome the bad guys, but it's ultimately too late to save herself, and so she dies a tragic death.  To my mind, that's a perfectly good pay-off to the story they were telling, and I don't really want to see it re-opened.  I'm keeping an open mind here, though.  So far, Craig Kyle and Chris Yost haven't really made clear what they're going to do with the character, but at least they're going back to the basics of the Belasco-corruption storyline, and they don't seem to be too weighed down by nostalgia considerations.

Magik only shows up towards the end of the issue, and doesn't get to say anything.  The actual story has the X-Men's students trapped in Limbo, while some of them run around wondering what to do.  Others get interrogated by Belasco, who wrongly believes that they know where Magik is.  In other words, it's an issue of building the threat, and depressingly, Kyle and Yost are slipping back to their old ways.  Yet again, they resort to doing it by maiming and killing the cast.

Now, I suspect that this time they don't intend it to stick.  When the lizard-boy loses an arm, well, it's pretty safe to assume he's growing it back.  (Either that, or Elixir will fix it.)  And it's Limbo, so you can always undo deaths with some vague muttering about time running strangely.  But this is a book that has slaughtered so many of its characters over the last year that it's ceased to mean anything on any level.  One of the title characters gets his heart ripped out on panel?  Yeah, well, whatever.  Another day at the office.

I've made this point before, but this book went so far over the top last year that it really needs an extended period to rebuild before it can expect this sort of thing to matter again.

Limbo is a neat setting for artist Skottie Young, since he's an exaggerated cartoonist, and in magical dimensions he can afford to go nuts.  He certainly does some good dramatic poses, but his action sequences are a little shaky - the panel of X-23 on page 1 is almost incomprehensible, and there's a later sequence with the second-tier students where the panels seem to have no real relationship to one another at all. Everyone's supposed to be standing on the edge of a precipice, to judge from the previous page, but then we get two pages where each panel seems to take place in a completely separate space.

Overall, it's an adequate build for Magik's return, let down more by the book's previous overuse of shock violence than by anything in the issue itself.

Rating: B

back | continue