Finally for this week's X-books, X-Treme X-Men is ploughing onwards with the tenuous film tie-in "God Loves, Man Kills II."

The main point of this issue is to get Kitty to Mount Haven and give her a guided tour of the town.  As you might expect, Mount Haven turns out to be one of those nice utopian towns with a nicely scrubbed guide where something is clearly going horribly wrong beneath the surface.  However, we don't get to the point of finding out what the "something" is.

Stryker doesn't get much to do this issue, and while Mount Haven gets plenty of space to introduce itself, we're still left in the dark as to what they're up to.  There's nothing particularly wrong with it, and the idea of Christians setting up a refuge town for mutants isn't a bad starting point, but the story only gets as far as hinting what Mount Haven might really be up to.  It'll read fine in the trade paperback, but the pace is flagging a bit this issue. 

Meanwhile, the other X-Men spend a third consecutive issue standing around on a hill talking about the plot, and it's probably time to move them along.  Again, it's not that any of this material is bad in itself, it's just the pacing that seems a little off.  Well, that and the extraordinary leaps of logic which Sage is allowed to make in order to get her to the correct conclusion.

It's an okay issue, but it doesn't really live up to the promise of some of the earlier parts of this storyline, and it's a bit on the slow side.  Still, that's not unusual in stories of this length.

Rating: B-

back | continue