Root canal surgery doesn't become any more pleasant just because you know it'll be over soon.  Similarly, the knowledge that Chuck Austen will be gone from Uncanny X-Men in a few months doesn't make me any more keen to read his remaining issues.

Still, at least the end is in sight.  Issue #434 is the seventh and final chapter of "The Draco".  I know it says part 6, but that's not counting the prologue.  In an act of noble self-sacrifice, I've re-read the whole arc.  It doesn't help.

Artist Philip Tan seems to have made an unadvertised disappearance after last issue.  Instead we've got Takeshi Miyazawa, the artist from the excellent Sidekicks.  Miyazawa is, in normal circumstances, a considerable trade up from Tan.  But this is a multi-inker rush job, of course.  Inevitably it doesn't come anywhere close to showing what Miyazawa is capable of. 

There are still some good visual moments, notably Ginniyeh's amazing shape-changing head.  The Juggernaut's scene is pretty decent as well.  But much of the issue looks sketchy, and rushed.  Probably because it was.

So much for the art.  What about the writing?

Well, "The Draco" was a bad idea to start with, and there's nothing here to turn that round.  In fairness to Austen, the Juggernaut subplot is perfectly decent - in his eagerness to see Sammy, he ends up hurting Sammy's mother, thus destroying Sammy's naive faith in him.  Simple, straightforward, effective.  It shouldn't have taken six issues to do it, though, and it would have worked much better simply as a one or two issue story in its own right.  Whatever parallels Austen thinks he's establishing in terms of father figures, they don't add anything.

The Azazel plot, of course, is a write-off.  Polaris opens up a big portal via Abyss's powers, and everything gets sucked through.  Thus, the X-Men get home.  Oh, but wait - we've forgotten to have a scene where the villains actually get defeated or thwarted or... anything, really.  So Nightcrawler has a swordfight with Azazel.  Hooray!  Azazel is knocked from the battlements of his castle and, uh, falls into... into... the vortex...

Um, isn't that vortex leading to earth?  Which is where he was trying to get anyway?  If he's not being sucked away to Earth, where is he going, and what's pulling him there?  For that matter, if Polaris and Abyss sucked the whole castle through to earth, what happened to all of Azazel's soldiers who were in the castle?  Are we meant to just forget about them?  The only logical answer suggested by the story is that Azazel and his army were sucked into the portal - but the portal leads to Earth, and if that happened, they won.  We're apparently meant to take it that they lost, but Austen is seemingly unwilling or unable to explain how or why that happened. 

It's not like Austen does any better with characterisation - neither Azazel nor his minions ever display a believable personality throughout the story.  Azazel is apparently appalled that his son would turn on him.  But if this really comes as a surprise to him, he must be truly stupid.  Kiwi Black never gets any character development at all, despite being a moderately significant character in the six-issue arc - in fact, he doesn't even speak until the closing pages of this issue, when he turns out to be a generic New Zealander.

A very bad idea, ineptly written.  Let us speak no more about it.

Rating: D

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