Uncanny X-Men wraps up "She Lies With Angels", and thank heaven for small mercies.

The trade paperback is solicited for May with the following blurb: "In this special tribute to William Shakespeare's most beloved work, Romeo & Juliet, popular X-Men artist Salvador Larroca illustrates a poignant but riveting tale about a young human and a young mutant falling in love, and what terrible consequences it will have not only for them, but for their family and friends."

Well, at least the guy who wrote the solicitation understood the point of Romeo & Juliet.  Of course, you don't need me to tell you that the story missed the mark badly, in all sorts of ways.  Partly that's because of Austen's complete inability to write a convincing human relationship.  His lovers were one-dimensional saints who stood around spewing awful romanticisms at one another, and who bore no relationship whatsoever to believable human beings.  Consequently, who cares whether they die?  For that matter, if Austen wanted us to care about Ray dying, it would have been nice to give him a personality first.

Partly it's just general sloppy writing.  Austen wants to subvert the ending by having Josh fail to kill himself because of his mutant powers.  Actually, not a bad idea.  But that means that Josh has to develop yet a third power - healing abilities - on top of his voice and wings.  The wings added nothing whatsoever to this story (other than some very pretty pictures).  The healing power is, at the last moment, vital to the plot.  Just a thought, but it might have been an idea to establish Josh as a healer at an earlier stage, so that the ending doesn't come out of nowhere.

Then there's the fact that Josh and Julia's relationship has no consequences for anyone else, because the Cabots were going to kill everyone anyway.  This is so fundamental to the plot  that its omission boggles the mind.

And of course, Austen never found any proper role for the X-Men in this story.  You'd have thought that a role for Husk was almost self-evident, not least because Austen had her brother as a spitting image of her boyfriend, but incredibly she never even comments on that.  So the X-Men hover around in the background waiting for something to happen, and Polaris gets her costume shredded because that's Way Cool.

On the plus side, the book certainly looks fantastic.  There's plenty to enjoy in Larroca's artwork, at least for so long as you can ignore the story.  Much of this is beautiful work, and Udon have done a lovely pastoral job on the colours.  It's a shame the art team aren't working with better material, because they're in a different league from the stories they're called on to illustrate.

I was amused to read in Joe Quesada and Mike Marts' recent Newsarama interview a passage in which they desperately attempted to identify something that made the three core X-Men titles different from one another.  Some measure of their difficulties can be found from their description of Chuck Austen's distinctive features.  "This is the high action book; this is the soap opera book." 

And that's meant to distinguish him from Chris Claremont and Joss Whedon?  High adventure and soap opera is their whole schtick!  If that's the best Marvel can come up with as a description of Austen and Larroca's distinctive qualities... well, it makes you wonder.

If anything, Austen's problems come from the fact that he isn't confining himself to that formula.  He keeps trying to do tributes to Shakespeare, elaborate stories about biblical mythology, and bizarre ramblings about Catholicism.  His reach far exceeds his grasp (which is somewhat shaky to start with), and the result is faintly embarrassing nonsense like "She Lies With Angels."

But beautifully drawn nonsense.  I've got to give it that.

Rating: C-

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