Moving up from the third tier to the second, New X-Men continues its ghost story.

There's kind of a structural problem here.  Most of the issue is devoted to characters wondering whether the ghost is real, or whether it's just a hoax - presumably caused by Hellion and his telekinesis.  And that gives us some perfectly good scenes where the New Mutants argue the point among themselves, while Cyclops finally hauls Hellion up for a stiff talk.

Problem is, we already know the ghost is real, because we saw it at the end of last issue.  In fact, Dani verifies that it's a ghost in panel 5, thanks to her Valkyrie powers.  So there's no actual mystery in all this, until the story finally gets onto "who is it and what do they want?"  And that doesn't come until towards the end of the book.  Might have been an idea to keep the ghost off panel at the end of issue #1, and save the reveal until this issue.

The soap opera subplots continue to tick over nicely, and Michael Ryan's art is well matched with the material.  But there's still something about this title that doesn't quite click.  It's not that it's a bad book - in fact, it's comfortably above average.  Yet it somehow feels like it ought to be better, and isn't quite achieving its potential.  There's something a little bit muted about it.  I can't quite put my finger on it.

I like the book a lot, but that's tempered by the nagging feeling that it ought to be better.  Weird.

Rating: B

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