Several people have asked me over the last week quite why I should be pleased to see Chris Claremont replacing Chuck Austen on Uncanny.  After all, as they rightly point out, Claremont wrote Uncanny only a couple of years ago - and boy, did it suck.

The short answer is that Claremont has been an awful lot better in the last year or so of X-Treme X-Men, and I can be confident of seeing at least some improvement.  That said, "Intifada" - which concludes this issue - hasn't been the most compelling illustration of Claremont's resurgence.

Despite a promising start, "Intifada" has floundered somewhat.  This final part suffers from a problem that's cropped up increasingly in the last few months.  While "Intifada" is billed as a storyline, it isn't one.  It may be the proposed break point for a trade paperback, but in no sense is it a story.

There are three plot threads in this arc - Storm's lobbying of a global conference on mutants, the mutant teen gang, and the corruption in the LA branch of X-Corp which has led to humans being driven out of the mixed town of Valle Soleada.  The teen gang, who are far and away the least interesting thread, get a resolution.  The lobbying simply succeeds, for no immediately discernible reason - and in this day and age, the idea of a global conference agreeing on anything just because Storm shows up and asks nicely strains credibility beyond breaking point.

The Valle Soleada plot, which is the most interesting one, doesn't really get resolved at all.  It ends up segueing into a storyline about corruption in X-Corp and doesn't deliver much in the way of closure.  Nor are we going back to it in the next arc - the next four issues are a serialised version of the Storm story which Claremont and Igor Kordey were originally going to produce as a graphic novel.  Rather, the storyline just flounders around for five issues with a distinct shapelessness.

Five issues is a bit much to spend on what seems like a transition arc.  There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the ideas here, but "Intifada" has taken a fairly long time to achieve not a great deal.  Combine that with some of Igor Kordey's less inspiring art - particularly on the previous issue - and the result is rather disappointing.

It's also alarming to see that Claremont seems to be relapsing into his bad habit of introducing minor henchman characters with no actual personality and then devoting pages to establishing their rather convoluted and gimmicky powers.  This was one of his most annoying habits on the previous Uncanny run, and with Skitz, Stringfellow and the like, he's doing it again.  I'm also less than pleased to see that the next arc brings back Tullamore Voge, a character who was a thoroughly unsuccessful idea the first time round and surely doesn't deserve a second try.

Still, it's not as bad as all that - "Intifada" is more slow and shapeless than actively bad.  It still has some perfectly good ideas at the root, and only the highly contrived lobbying storyline really fails to work.  It's alright, but it's not Claremont's best work from this year.

Rating: B-

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