Over in Uncanny X-Men, Ed Brubaker and Billy Tan have finally completed their twelve-issue epic "Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire."

I have a lot of time for Ed Brubaker.  He's an enormously talented writer, albeit that his reputation was built more on down-to-earth, street-level stories than on intergalactic space opera.  Still, the early chapters of this storyline earned a lot of brownie points by actually pacing themselves for the monthly title.  Unlike many of his peers, Brubaker rightly kept an eye on the need to make his issues somewhat self-contained, instead of just treating them as arbitrary page breaks in the trade paperback.

But as the story has gone on, I've increasingly found myself wondering what on earth Brubaker is trying to achieve here.  It's become harder and harder to see how the story could possibly reach a satisfactory resolution in the remaining space.  And now, with the final issue, we have the answer: it doesn't.  The effect of "Rise and Fall" is to change the status quo of the Shi'ar Empire, but in a way that seems mainly designed to set the stage for future stories.

Basically, by the end of the story, Vulcan is ruling the Empire, and the Starjammers have a new line-up (with some of the unwanted X-Men banished to join them).  And that's essentially it.  Professor X gets his powers back as well, but in a way that makes me wonder why Marvel bothered removing them in the first place.

Reading the story as a whole, and without the expectation of a proper pay-off, you can see rather more clearly what it's trying to do.  It's attempting to cement Vulcan as an A-list villain by putting him in charge of a whole intergalactic empire.  Even so, twelve issues is an awful lot of space just to end up with what reads suspiciously like a pitch for a New Starjammers title.

As for Vulcan, the character still doesn't quite work.  The history is just a little too convoluted and contrived to make him a truly convincing character.  He started out aiming to take revenge on the Shi'ar, and now he's running the empire without any particularly convincing epiphany to explain his change of heart.  And for this story to work, not only do we have to believe in Vulcan, but we also have to believe that the Shi'ar people will accept him as their leader.  In fact, considering this story's political aspirations, the actual Shi'ar people are noticeably absent.  I have real trouble with the idea of them blithely accepting Vulcan, or even D'Ken or Deathbird, as an authority figure. They don't seem like a nation, so much as a bunch of generic aliens who do whatever the plot asks of them.

This story doesn't leave me wanting more of the Shi'ar empire, let alone Vulcan.  The whole story isn't really Brubaker's forte, and I'm hoping things will click better in his next arc, when we get back to earth.  Overall, though, I'd have to class this arc as an ambitious failure.

Rating: C+

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