It's a nice quiet week by the X-books' standards - one ongoing title, three miniseries, and (in theory) X-Men Unlimited #11, which didn't show up at my store.  Maybe next week.

Our token ongoing title is Uncanny X-Men #468, finishing off the three-part "Grey's End."  The April solicitations have confirmed that Chris Claremont is leaving the title soon - presumably after issue #475 in June.  And after sitting through three issues of this, I can't say I'll miss him.

The plot for this arc, in a nutshell, goes like this.  Rachel goes to stay with the Grey family, and tries to have a fairly normal life for a bit.  Everything is going nicely.  The Greys invite round the whole extended family tree for a party.  Then the Shi'ar turn up and kill everyone, in an attempt to wipe out the Phoenix bloodline.  By the time they're subdued, they've slaughtered everyone except for Rachel and Jean Grey's mum - who then rejects Rachel anyway.  Rachel swears revenge on the Shi'ar.

So... three issues of slaughter, basically.  Part one did a decent job of setting up the Grey family.  The rest is just a big fight scene, and not a particularly well constructed one.  Clear storytelling has never been Chris Bachalo's forte, and this issue is no exception.  On top of that, Claremont has slipped back to his bad habit of introducing teams of random henchmen as if they were exciting new characters, without actually making them remotely interesting in any way.  This time, it's the Shi'ar Death Commandos (as opposed, presumably, to the Shi'ar Polite Warning Commandos).  If you yearn for 1993, you'll be thrilled to learn that they have names like Offset, Warshot, Hypernova and Flaw.  And they don't have a single personality trait to share between them.  There is nothing the slightest bit interesting about these bozos.

(For that matter, given that they ambushed the party and Rachel didn't notice them until people standing next to her got killed, why didn't they just kill her first?  I don't think they're very good at being Death Commandos.)

Fundamentally, it's not a very engaging concept.  I suppose you can make the case that it's giving some sort of direction to Rachel Grey, and god knows she could use one.  But it's not a very interesting direction.  The last thing this character needed was more misery, and I can't say I have the faintest interest in seeing her fight more faceless nobodies in a revenge attack.

Can we just get this over with and move on to something more entertaining?

Rating: C+

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