It's U-Decide week!  Do you care?  Of course you don't.  To be honest, my original plan was to ignore it altogether and review One Plus One #1 instead - except it didn't seem to ship to Glasgow yet.  Maybe next week.  So instead, here's this week's three X-books and a whole slew of new series.  Which happens to include the U-Decide books.

Soldier X is continuing the arc about Magdalena, the amazing healing girl from Krasnaya Polyana.  Krasnaya Polyana is a real village, by the way, and from a quick Google search it appears to be a skiing resort in the Caucuses.  It sounds quite nice, to be honest.  Why Macan chose it, and whether it's meant to mean anything to me, I have no idea.

In fact, the plot sort of hovers around the background doing not a great deal until the closing pages.  Nathan turns up in Krasnaya Polyana with Magdalena's father, who promptly decides this wasn't a good idea after all and goes home.  Macan uses this to play off the obvious reading of Jeph Loeb's inane Askani slogan ("What is, is") and give Nathan an opportunity to reject the fatalistic interpretation.  Nathan chooses to express his newfound interest in converting the world to the Askani philosophy (which lasts him about six pages) by stealing a bicycle.  Ah, bicycle theft as a metaphor for misplaced enthusiasm.  Nothing like the old classics, is there?

While Macan spends most of the issue addressing Nathan's lack of direction, it would be stretching a point to say that the story is really advanced all that much.  It's an interesting theme, but there's a limit to how much inconclusive soul searching a character can do.

Back at the supposed A plot, we get a scene of Magdalena being exploited as a healer.  There's a suitably icky sequence of her steeling herself to kiss decidedly unpleasant ailments, and Macan gets across the general idea of the character as completely under the thumb of her mother.    We're still left without any real idea of why Nathan's after her, which fits well enough with the theme that he's blindly following Blaquesmith's directions in lieu of having any direction of his own.  On the other hand, it doesn't do a great deal to build tension, since we don't really have much idea what Nathan's trying to achieve here and what threat, if any, he's supposed to be dealing with.

Oh, there's also a subplot with the two SHIELD agents, which fleshes out Gilbert Jordan's motivation for hunting down Cable and adds some more dimensions to Dragonfly.  Dragonfly's still a rather broad and contrived-looking comic relief character, although all the other characters around him seem to find him unbearable as well.  Turning him into a more rounded character is not going to be easy from this starting point, but Macan sets out some promising ideas in their scene here

Igor Kordey's art is at the rougher end of the scale here, but the layouts are as strong as ever.  His splash page with Nathan entering through the church roof is excellent.

There are plenty of interesting ideas here, but they don't quite feel like an overall story.  That's an inevitable difficulty with any story that focuses on the lead character's lack of objective.  Perhaps next issue, when we hopefully find out what Blaquesmith wants with the girl, things will begin to pull together.

Rating: B+

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