Uncanny X-Men #445 is the second Claremont/Davis issue.

For the moment, the plot seems to be following two completely unrelated threads.  The first half of the book follows Nightcrawler and Wolverine trying to carry out their XSE jobs and being met with complete lack of co-operation from the cops.  Well, not so much lack of co-operation.  The cops beat them up.  It's not a good day for Logan and Kurt.

We've seen the basic idea before - the X-Men try to do good, but the anti-mutant bigots won't accept them.  Still, this is meant to be a jumping on point.  No harm in re-establishing the basic ideas, and showing how they apply to the XSE.

Over in the second half of the book, Rachel, Bishop and Sam head to England to visit Brian Braddock, and end up in a fight with the Fury.  I'm in two minds about this.  The Fury is a fairly obscure Captain Britain villain, originally created by Davis and Alan Moore.  It's a robot that kills superheroes.  That's all it does.  It's only ever fought Captain Britain (and succeeded in killing him). 

There are good reasons for that.  The nature of the character is that it leaves a trail of superhero corpses behind it.  Of course, it can't go around killing the title characters in most books because they're needed for the next issue.  So it's virtually impossible to use the Fury without watering down the concept.  Similar problems have dogged the Juggernaut, who's supposed to be unstoppable, but in practice gets stopped on a regular basis, to the point where his claim to unstoppability became worthless.  Unless you're prepared to throw the Fury some characters to kill, it's hard to use it without compromising what made it cool in the first place.

Cannonball appears to be the designated victim this issue, which would at least explain why he was omitted from the recent Official Handbook.  But given that the Fury is thinking about "assimilating" Sage rather than killing her, I have a sinking feeling that the character is going to end up being watered down enormously.  Even Cannonball can't actually be dead, given that he's due to be in X-Force in a few months time.

That being said, this is still some of Claremont's better recent work - his dialogue quirks aren't too prominent, the characters are comfortably familiar, and the pacing's pretty good.  Davis' art is also a big selling point.  While the first issue looked a little awkward, this is much more comfortable.  Dodgy costume design aside, this has got some beautiful work, helped by an impressive colouring job from Frank D'Armata.

Pretty good.

Rating: B+

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