This is the penultimate issue of Darko Macan and Igor Kordey's run on Soldier X, which has attracted some critical acclaim and bugger all sales.  So in this and the next issue, we're getting that old standard of low-selling comics - the extremely quick wrap-up.

The previous storyline, in which Nathan Summers took five months to rescue a girl from a church, was admittedly on the slow side.  This issue, Macan returns to the more compressed storytelling of his earlier issues, and it's an improvement.  The main point of this issue is to clear up the subplot about Blaquesmith (and, in the original storyline, presumably to establish the relationship that he and Nathan were going to have as the series progressed).

Nathan is in Kashmir this month, where a demented Pakistani general is busily killing children in the hope of finding one with superpowers.  We never actually get told who we was looking for, come to think of it, but that might be one of the plot points that's being shoved to the side in the scramble to tie things up.  What we do get is a concise piece of storytelling, with Nathan getting to be satisfyingly heroic again, and some fun comic relief with the general and his translators.  It's much stronger than the previous storyline, to be honest.

The story ends with a set-up looping back to the Jackie Singapore material from the final issue of Cable.  It appears that the big plan was for Nathan to accept Singapore's proposal to turn him into a media celebrity, on the basis that that would give him a greater position of influence.  On the one hand, that's not a bad concept; on the other hand, it's very similar to what X-Statix is already doing.

A definite improvement, but it's all a bit academic at this point.

Rating: B+

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