Rob Rodi has got nerve, I'll give him that.  Two issues into his Rogue series and he's already laying out vast chunks of her history which have been deliberately concealed until now.  Such as her real name.

I'm in two minds about this.  Rogue's history has been kept a mystery for so long that it seems very anticlimactic to simply lay it all out like this.  But on the other hand, after all these years, it's hard to see what could have really worked as a pay-off - at least, not without saddling Rogue with some cumbersome back story involving yet more supervillains. 

Rodi goes a different route, giving us a relatively sensible family background with parents in a commune and an emotionally repressed aunt who took over once mom disappeared.  The plot then shifts to the question of what happened to mommy.  Still, Rogue doesn't know that either - so effectively, this issue brings us up to speed on all the family background material which Rogue presumably knew already, but didn't feel like sharing with us before.

As back story, it's perfectly solid stuff.  I'd rather see Rogue with something relatively conventional like this than tie her early life into some bizarre scheme.  True, we're doubtless heading for some weird explanation of what happened to mom, but that doesn't actually factor into Rogue's personal history (save as a device to remove mom from the scene).  It's better to keep this part of her life relatively normal.

However, the plot has bizarre problems of motivation and logic.  Rogue is acting very strangely here, and I don't get the impression that it's a deliberate writing choice.  There's no sensible basis for her decision to stop answering the X-Men's calls - why does she need to throw away her mobile phone before going to visit her family?  Can't she just turn it off?  And after so many years of avoiding the family, her decision to go now seems thoroughly undermotivated.

Still, the art's attractive, the cliffhanger's cute, and I do like the device of having Rogue appear in flashbacks, standing in for the person whose memories she absorbed.  There's a lot to like about this book, but it's mixed in with some very strange and irritating plot holes.

Rating: B-

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