If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I complain from time to time about Marvel putting out way too many X-books at once.  This week takes us to the next level, with Marvel releasing an absolutely insane quantity of comics, period.  Six of them are X-books, but luckily for me, four of them are in mid-storyline.  It's weeks like this that remind me why I changed the format.

I'd be fascinated to know the thinking behind this week's deluge.  The theory has been mooted that Marvel is trying to blast Final Crisis off the shelves.  I suppose that's possible, but I can't imagine it working.  It seems much more likely to me that Marvel's own titles will just have got lost in the shuffle.

Anyway, this week's big X-book would be Uncanny X-Men #499.  Whatever it may say on the recap page, this is the fifth and final part of the book's "Divided We Stand" arc, leaving the way clear for the new direction starting in issue #500.

There are two parallel strands to this story.  In San Francisco, Scott and Emma free the city from the influence of Mastermind, who's turned the place into a hippy throwback commune.  And in Russia, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Wolverine cross paths with the Red Room, and end up fighting Omega Red.

There's no obvious connection between these two stories.  At times, the rhythm of the intercutting feels as though Ed Brubaker is trying to draw some sort of parallels, but quite what they might be escapes me.  To be perfectly honest, the main thing I took from this arc was that they had five issues to kill before issue #500, and so they threw in a couple of lower-key stories as a change of pace.

Not that I have a problem with that, mind you.  The curse of modern comics is to lurch from one big event to the next.  And not everything can be an earthshaking story.  There's something to be said for easing off the throttle for a few months, and just letting the X-Men fight bad guys in relatively inconsequential stories for a bit.

To be fair, this isn't a completely throwaway arc.  It gets the X-Men to San Francisco, where the series will now be set.  The idea is growing on me, but I'll come back to it next month when it's properly underway.  However, it feels rather tacked on in this issue.  The X-Men fight a villain, and then the mayor of San Francisco shows up at the end to say "Hey, how about moving in?" 

When all is said and done, there's not much to either of these arcs, and not much to unite them as a larger whole.  The art also seems to take a knock this issue, with fill-in artist Ben Oliver doing half the book.  Unfortunately, it's the San Francisco half, meaning that Mike Choi and Sonia Oback end up drawing a fight scene in a darkened metal room, instead of the flower-child scenes that would have played to their strengths.

It's a passable issue, and there's something to be said for it as a change of pace in the context of the series as a whole.  But it's far from essential reading.

Rating: B-

back | continue