New X-Men #5 is largely devoted to a dangling question from New Mutants - the minor point that when Kevin Ford's powers emerged, he accidentally killed his father.

The FBI show up at the school and demand that they hand Kevin over.  Or, to be slightly more accurate, they ask nicely for the X-Men to hand Kevin over - actually taking him by force wouldn't exactly be an option.  Cue much handwringing as everyone tries to work out whether this would be fair.

To be honest, something does seem a little off here.  Agent Pierce makes it quite clear that he doesn't actually think Kevin murdered his parents - he's correctly worked out that it was an accident.  So why is he trying to arrest him?  Asking for co-operation in inquiries would seem sensible enough, but if Pierce positively doesn't think Kevin did anything wrong, isn't he going a little over the top?

But "arrest" is a lot more dramatic than "help out", so that's the direction we're going.  And it does allow for much more straightforward angsting by the characters.

At this point, some of you are probably thinking, isn't this the exact same dilemma from the "Schism" storyline in X-Treme X-Men?  Yes.  It is.  However, that story had an awful lot of rubbish floating around in it as well, so I don't really have a problem with this title coming back to focus on the point more effectively.

The book comes down with a fairly definitive answer: yes, they should surrender Kevin to the FBI.  Otherwise they're saying that mutants are above the law, and that's not the message to be sending.  Not surprisingly, many of the characters are sufficiently sceptical about the honesty of the government that they don't buy into this argument.  Rather neatly, DeFilippis and Weir set up plenty of unequivocally sympathetic characters as sharing that scepticism, including Dani.  So when Julian Keller stands up and does a little speech on the subject, it sounds like he's showing his MLK side, up until you think through the implications of what he's saying.  Nice touch.

The New Mutants have a vague stab at stopping Kevin from being handed over, but are once again foiled by the same fatal flaw that undid them last issue - they're clueless, they don't know what they're doing, and consequently they suck.  Since this book is a teen drama rather than a superhero title, the creators can get away with writing the characters like this.  It's a nice change from everyone turning out to have incredible innate talents, after all.

Michael Ryan arrives as the new regular penciller (which, on past form for this title, means he should be around for three or four issues).  It's okay work, but it's not his best - I wonder if he's better cast on something with a little more visual action going on.

Rating: B+

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