Another week, another Chuck Austen comic.  The man is ubiquitous.  For those of you keeping track at home, Austen is currently writing Uncanny X-Men, Captain America, The Call, Exiles, War Machine, The Eternal and Superman: Metropolis.  In fairness, two of those are miniseries, one is a cancelled book, one's a fill-in run and he's moving on from Captain America shortly.  Maybe a lower workload will help improve his quality control, which has been alarmingly erratic as of late.

This is the second half of "Sacred Vows", and it brings the Lorna/Alex/Annie romantic triangle to a head.  In fairness, it's not as bad as I'd feared.  Austen doesn't expect us to believe in a bizarre "love at first sight" relationship between Alex and Annie after all.  It turns out that Carter the Psychic Kid has been linking their minds in dreams for months, so they've been subconsciously dreaming together all this time.  Aww.

Now, I'll grant him, this at least drags the plot kicking and screaming back into the realms of the recognisable human interaction.  But it doesn't alter the fact that the story spent most of the time somewhere else entirely.  Since Carter seemed to find it fairly difficult to make telepathic contact with Alex at all in earlier issues, this really comes out of the blue.

And if Austen wants me to care about Alex and Annie's relationship, there's still much more work to be done in making the characters believable.  Annie's a two-dimensional character.  Dimension one is pining after Alex and loving her son, and dimension two is occasionally muttering about feeling uncomfortable around mutants.  And does Carter have a personality at all?

Austen's version of Lorna is so thoroughly unsympathetic that it eliminates any real tension or awkwardness from the triangle, and makes it highly implausible that Alex would have agreed to marry her in the first place - she's been written so far out of character that it's astonishing the X-Men didn't wrestle her into a straitjacket several issues ago.  Lorna's reduced to a crudely-written blocking character, a status pretty much acknowledged when Alex and Annie don't even seem to care about jilting her on her wedding day - they just fly off to Paris as if she didn't exist.  Still, at least she gets to singlehandedly knock out an entire congregation of superheroes in one panel because the plot demands it.

This isn't terrible, but it's still pretty bad.

Rating: C

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