Once again, there's just the one X-book out this week.  And it's Uncanny X-Men, still working its way through the year-long "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" storyline.

Commendably for such a long story, Ed Brubaker has stuck to his guns and continued to pace the story for the serial format.  Every issue is at least largely self-contained while advancing the larger plot.  It's almost a forgotten art these days, and one of the pleasures of this storyline is seeing it revived.

But even with good pacing on its side, a year of this storyline is becoming rather wearing.  We've now got only two months left to go, and while the story is building to a climax, I have to admit I'm losing interest.

There are a number of problems here.  I've never been especially keen on outer space stories - they've always struck me as a diversion from what the X-Men are really about.  I can't take Korvus seriously in the slightest, and even when I try to, there's not much there to hold on to.  By the way, there's a panel here with Korvus putting that stupid sword back into the scabbard slung over his back.  Given the length of the sword, pause for a moment to consider just how high up the handle would have to be at the moment of entering the scabbard, and therefore how physically impossible the scene actually is.

But mainly, the focus seems to have drifted from the X-Men themselves to the internal politics of the Shi'ar.  And I don't care about the Shi'ar.  I don't believe in the Shi'ar Empire - it doesn't feel real to me.  Of course, it's all in the best traditions of space opera to have a starfaring alien race still behaving as though it's the Middle Ages.  That's not the problem.  The problem is that we're doing stories about power struggles to control an empire, and there's absolutely no sense of the Shi'ar Empire as a real place.  Where are the people?  Does nobody live in the Shi'ar Empire?  How can you do stories about overthrowing the government, and civil wars breaking out, where the general public are totally invisible?  It's like we're in a little cocoon, a bit like the old BBC historical dramas where they couldn't afford crowds of extras and just had key historical figures in a room.  But at least they bothered to mention what the unseen crowd was up to.

I mean, it's fine when it's about the X-Men running around and hitting things, and there are nice enough character moments.  But it's turned into a story about who gets to run an "empire" that barely exists as anything more than a genre setting for space opera stories.  And I just don't care all that much.

Rating: C+

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