Finally for this week's X-books... oh dear god no.  No.  Surely not.

X-Treme X-Men is still in Madripoor.  It's still the aftermath of the Khan invasion, now stretching into its ninth interminable issue.  This storyline is so boring and overlong that even its epilogue takes two months, for christ's sake.  Pick up the damn pace.

Anyway, the X-Men are all in hospital after the getting the shit kicked out of them for most of the storyline, and some of them are dying.  Cue lots of stuff about spirits leaving bodies and having near death experiences until they're persuaded to come back.  This sort of thing is desperately cheesy at the best of times.  Pulling the story twice in one issue - with both Gambit and Storm - is just annoying.

Rogue goes after Gambit to bring him back.  Meanwhile, Storm goes to the afterlife and visits her parents, in a touching scene where she gets her father's name wrong.  (He's called David, not John.)  I really couldn't care less about either.

Slipstream, of all people, has the most interesting story arc here.  He has a subplot where he can't deal with his sister's change of appearance, freaks out and runs off.  It's not much, but at least it's going some way towards giving him a personality.

On the plus side, some of the astral plane sequences are beautiful, Larroca adopts some more relaxed panel layouts without sacrificing too much in the way of clarity.   Liquid do an excellent colouring job, as well, with pastels in those scenes forming a good contrast with the sharper colours in the rest of the book.

Nonetheless, I'm getting very tired of Claremont's repeated moralising that we all need to have more determination and passion.  Rogue winds up the story with the line "We're X-Men, Logan.  What defines us is hope.  That's why we don't give up.  That's why, no matter what the odds, we find a way to win."  The cast of this book have been saying this kind of thing a lot lately.

It's facile rubbish and I don't want to hear it.  Hope is a lovely thing, but it does not win battles and it does not allow you to achieve the impossible.  It does not turn an unjust world into a just one, and stories that tell you otherwise are insulting your intelligence.  I have nothing against happy endings and upbeat messages, but only when I can relate them to the real world.  Pursuing this line of thinking to its logical conclusion results in some downright offensive conclusions.  (All those people killed in the Holocaust?  Not enough hope.  Not enough passion.  Should have tried harder.  Could have defeated the odds then.)  This is a fairy-tale moral for kindergartens.

Get away from Madripoor, and quit it with the rose-tinted glasses.

Rating: C-

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