It's another quiet week for the X-books, with just the two titles.  Both of them are in mid-storyline, so I'd normally skip over them and wait for the end of the arc.  Still, the X-Axis ought to contain at least one X-book, and besides, Uncanny X-Men won't finish its current storyline until issue #486, some time in 2007.  So let's see how Ed Brubaker is getting along.

This is part 3 of "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire", and a passing reference to Vulcan idolising Julius Caesar suggests that the allusion to Gibbons will be more than just a cute play on words.  The title also begs the obvious question of how the Shi'ar Empire is going to do any rising in the course of the plot, given that the story mainly involves Vulcan trying to destroy it.  But there's time enough to address that.

Although this is a twelve-issue storyline - not strictly year-long, as Uncanny is published fourteen times a year - Brubaker is pacing the story for the monthly title, breaking down the action issue by issue.  Part 1 was the gathering of the team, part 2 was the X-Men recovering the ship they needed to pursue Vulcan into Shi'ar space.  Part 3 doesn't feature the X-Men at all - it's Vulcan's issue, filling us in on what he's been up to.

Unfortunately, this brings back some of the problems that dragged down X-Men: Deadly Genesis, the miniseries where Vulcan debuted.  The man is a huge, walking retcon who requires an awful lot of explanation.  And that's basically what we get in this issue - an awful lot of explanation, mixed with recaps of the explanations we already received in Deadly Genesis.

The problem with Vulcan is that he gets terribly bogged down in continuity.  Not only is it impossible to explain his origin story without getting into the mechanics of how Deadly Genesis retconned Giant-Size X-Men #1, but on top of that, he's saddled with a burning desire for revenge on Shi'ar Emperor D'Ken - who was replaced back in the 1970s and hasn't been seen since.  Vulcan is over a quarter of a century late for the revenge he ought to be seeking, and the story has to awkwardly shift his focus to the Shi'ar as a whole.  No doubt Brubaker will try to turn that into a virtue, but it still means that the story is doomed to get mired in exposition.

I rather enjoyed Deadly Genesis despite recognising that it was awfully heavy on the continuity and probably of limited appeal outside hardcore fans.  Brubaker's first two issues of Uncanny were better as stories, but we're back to Deadly Genesis territory here.  And worryingly, the problem seems to be Vulcan himself.  As long as this guy is appearing in stories where he's the central figure, we're going to keep wrestling with his cumbersome history.  The actual character is still smothered under a weight of continuity.

On top of that, the story has some odd ideas about the Shi'ar themselves.  The plot requires Vulcan to hijack a Shi'ar ship.  So we have Vulcan putting on a display of power, and then a Shi'ar warship just surrenders to him because they're terribly impressed.  The idea is meant to be that the Shi'ar respect power, which I suppose might be intended to explain why the empire put up with D'Ken and Deathbird.  But come on.  This is the Shi'ar military.  Since when do they roll over without a fight when they're faced with a powerful enemy?  It never seems to bother them when they're going after Phoenix, and she's even more powerful than Vulcan.  I just don't buy it.

Fill-in art comes from Clayton Henry.  Generally, his art is technically solid but rather antiseptic and lacking in atmosphere.  As it happens, he's well cast on this story - outer space battle scenes fit his style nicely, and he seems to be having a good day with the visual storytelling.  The story comes out looking rather good.

But the story is slipping back into stodgy exposition, and this may be a fundamental problem with Vulcan as a character.  Hopefully Brubaker can bring his personality out more effectively now that we're over this hump, but I'm starting to worry a little about whether the character can really carry a twelve-issue story.

Rating: B

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