When it comes to subtlety, however, Uncanny X-Men is as a beautiful feather drawn softly across the brow of a sleeping child when compared to Weapon X.

This is a Very Special Episode of Weapon X, showing us what's going on in those prison camps of the Director's, from the perspective of the inmates.  As normal, Tieri seems keen to bring in obscure expendable characters to flesh out the background, so we get appearances by Maggott, Cecilia Reyes, and even no-hopers like Wildside.

The set-up is that the Weapon X programme has been going around interning mutants on trumped-up charges of terrorism.  This has to be read as another attack on the anti-terrorism paranoia and the erosion of civil liberties.  But the legitimacy of the metaphor is questionable.  For all that the present US government seems to have a total disregard for human rights and civil liberties in the pursuit of the ridiculous War on Terrorism Iraq, nonetheless there's no real reason to think that they're going to adopt a policy of internment based on corruptly fabricated charges which they don't even believe in.

Presumably Tieri is making the "slippery slope" argument - that once you allow due process and civil liberties to be eroded, the system becomes open to abuse and exploitation by the genuinely corrupt.  And that's a perfectly valid point as far as it goes, but not one that really requires an entire issue to make.  As depicted in this issue, the Director is essentially running a Nazi concentration camp, complete with the genocidal extermination of minorities, and non-consensual experimentation on them.

This stretches credibility to breaking point even in the current climate.  It also results in an issue of unremittingly obvious tugging at the heartstrings.  What, ultimately, is the point of an entire issue in the non-existent concentration camps of Weapon X?  The point, it seems, is that concentration camps are a bad thing, and not much fun to live in.  Well, yes, and?  Does this really come as a surprise to anyone reading?  For this sort of story to be genuinely affecting as opposed to just cloying, it needs to have a degree of credibility in setting and characterisation - see, for a very obvious example, Life is Beautiful.  When the set-up is as absurdly over-the-top as this, it doesn't really work.

It all comes down to credibility.  Is it really believable that the Director could be engaged in spurious arrests of hundreds of innocent mutants without attracting the attention of somebody who would put a stop to it?  We're even shown that some of his staff have ethical qualms about what they're doing, and are trying to help mutants escape.  Have they, perhaps, considered phoning the X-Men?  They're in the book these days.  But no.  The point here isn't that I want to see a crossover with the X-Men - it's that, within the ground rules this series has established for itself, I can't accept that an illegal, genocidal concentration camp on this scale could be operated without attracting outside attention, especially when it clearly isn't staffed solely by brainwashed zealots

Less is more, and this storyline might work if it wasn't so determined to make the camps as bad as can possibly be imagined.  But this is just too much, and simply not plausible on its own terms.

Rating: C

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