Mercifully, X-Treme X-Men is the last of this week's X-books.  Because god knows by the time I'd got through this one, I was begging for the end.

This is the fourth and final part of "Storm: The Arena", originally intended as a Storm graphic novel.  And it's horrible.  Since Claremont was announced as returning to Uncanny X-Men, I've been telling people that this is a definite improvement, taking into account the work he's been doing on this title over 2003.

"The Arena" has been simply terrible, and does nothing whatsoever to help my argument.  It's been in the pipeline for ages, and I can only hope that it's a hangover from the days before Claremont's writing improved.  A bunch of underground mutants fight one another in arenas, and there's assorted stuff about mind control (with Claremont's usual BDSM overtones).

And what happens?  Storm gets rid of the bosses, inherits a leadership role, and proceeds to do exactly what she always does when faced with a leadership role.  She completely ignores her responsibilities and delegates all the work to... Callisto.

Because that worked really well with the Morlocks, didn't it?

Claremont seems to love putting Storm in these leadership roles.  Yet he seemingly isn't prepared to derail the wider plot by having Storm actually do the job, in which case there's not much point in the whole exercise.

It's not a great looking issue, either. To judge from the five credited inkers, deadlines have been catching up with Igor Kordey again.  And boy, does it show.  Kordey's also produced some thoroughly hideous clothes for this entire storyline, so even when his layouts are on form and the inking is consistent, it's been a bit testing for the eyes.

We've seen this done before, by Claremont, with this character.  It was better the first time - and it didn't really work then either.

Rating: D+

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