There are worse things to be than consistently passable.  Nonetheless, it's not really something to aspire to, and Uncanny X-Men seems to be stalling at that level.  And this isn't one of its better efforts.

This is the second part of the Dominant Species storyline, but things seem to be going a little off the rails.  Last issue, Austen gave a decent build-up to his villains.  This issue, they beat the shit out of the X-Men.  They have a great character design from Kia Asamiya, but when you get down to it, they're just a bunch of werewolves, and they don't show much in the way of personality.  All that build up goes to waste, since now that we're getting to see the villains, it turns out that they aren't really very interesting.

Austen's point seems to be that not all mutants will be the next step in evolution; some mutations will be evolutionary successes, and others won't.  Thus, the assumption that mutants as a whole are the next evolutionary step is misconceived.  This is a perfectly reasonable plot, but quite how it's illustrated by having the X-Men fight some werewolves, I'm not very clear.

Over in the other half of the plot, Polaris pops round to visit the comatose Alex Summers and set up the bizarre romantic triangle with Annie Ghazikhanian.  For those of you who haven't been following this plot, Annie the nurse is in love with Alex, despite only having known him as a coma patient.  Polaris, meanwhile, has had a long and healthy relationship with Alex in the past.  In theory this isn't a bad idea for a plot, but a crashing lack of subtlety and heavy melodrama sends it nastily awry.

Annie's obsession with a comatose man is, by any reasonable standards, weird and creepy.  Polaris' attitude, in contrast, is more or less reasonable.  But Annie's meant to be the sympathetic character here, so she's played as a starcrossed love, while Polaris is a raving lunatic.  The whole scene is ridiculously over the top, and credibility goes flying out the window.  This storyline might have worked if everyone was acting within the bounds of sanity, but it's degenerated alarmingly into ridiculousness.

Asamiya's new costume for Polaris doesn't help much.  There's a lot to enjoy about his art - the layouts are generally pretty good, the action sequences aren't bad.  The character designs are patchy, though, and Polaris is a particularly odd example.  It may seem odd to criticise a superhero comic for stupid clothes, but when Lorna turns up wearing what appears to be a cast-off Hallowe'en witch costume, even someone with my limited sense of style can only gawp and doubletake at Lorna's shockingly poor taste.  And of course, it hardly helps the subtlety of the scene.

This isn't such a terrible comic, but it's badly flawed, and seriously lacking in subtlety.  It doesn't deliver on the promise of the first part of this storyline.

Rating: B-

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