Meanwhile, in the regular titles, X-Men #207 completes the thirteen-part "Messiah Complex."

Hmm.  I'm in two minds about this story, now that it's finished.  Basically, I've quite enjoyed it.  Thirteen-part crossovers between four titles are unwieldy beasts.  The creators have wisely chosen to do a straightforward action story, in which lots of characters race around chasing after the baby, and ultimately, somebody gets it. 

Some other plots are tied up or advanced along the way, but at its core, "Messiah Complex" is a very simple story that sets aside any pretensions of depth to give us brightly-coloured characters hitting one another for three months.  On a weekly schedule, this relatively lightweight story bounces along just fine.  It doesn't actually establish what the baby leads to, or in what specific way she's meant to matter.  But it drops fairly clear hints as to who she is, and it does resolve the key question of who gets to raise her.

All this is fine.  The problems with "Messiah Complex" stem from the fact that it's also trying to set up a line-wide reshuffle, and at the same time, Mike Carey wants it to tie up a Rogue storyline.  Oh, and it needs an excuse to feature the New X-Men.  Consequently, the story features quite a few elements which feel as though they've been bolted on to the core.

Let's be blunt: the New X-Men didn't need to be in this story.  Their contribution is fairly minor, and all they really do is chuck in an extra complication or two.  X-Factor had a slightly better excuse, but not for their whole cast.  But with the benefit of hindsight, if they were going to cancel it anyway, New X-Men would probably have been better off spending three issues tying up its plots.

Clearly "Messiah Complex" was tasked with a deck-clearing exercise.  We've got Cyclops clearly established as the alpha male in place of Professor X,  and that's a smart move.  We've got rid of Sentinel Squad O*N*E, and thank heavens for that.  But the introduction of X-Force still feels contrived, and frankly, I still don't understand what the concept is, beyond "They've all got very similar powers."  Even though I like most of the characters, and have plenty of time for the creators working on the upcoming X-Force series, "Messiah Complex" didn't do a great deal to interest me in it.

And then we have the finale, in which Professor X is seemingly bumped off, apparently leading to the disbanding of the team.  Now, the solicitations have made it perfectly clear that he doesn't actually die, which makes this ending a rather confusing piece of false tension.  It doesn't flow logically from the story - it feels almost like a hangover from some earlier draft where Xavier was standing on the fringes wailing "Why can't we all get along?"  In the event, he's barely had a role in this story, so shooting him at the end doesn't really work, dramatically.

Nor is it immediately clear to me why that would lead to the X-Men disbanding.  But then again, I tentatively welcome that direction.  The basic problem with M-Day is that if there are no mutants, the X-Men no longer have a viable mission.  In other words, they've got nothing to do.  Now, the baby has solved that problem to a degree by establishing that there will be mutants again in the end.  But she doesn't answer the question of what the X-Men are going to do in the meantime, and frankly, if we're going down this route for the foreseeable future, it makes more sense to acknowledge the implications of where we've got to and close the team down.  They have no point.  They might as well go home.  We can do stories about them as individual characters instead, while the baby subplot builds in the background.

Yet even though this works in a broad sense, I didn't get the feeling that "Messiah Complex" set it up very convincingly.  It's almost an echo of "One More Day", which - leaving aside for a moment the fact that it was rubbish - was clearly engineered to provide a justification for undoing the marriage.  But instead, it's been used as a device to make all sorts of other changes that don't flow logically from the plot at all.  Of course, "Messiah Complex" is nothing like as egregious an example.  But it does seem to be making a similar mistake.  This storyline sets up the new Cable series, and sets it up very well.  Unfortunately, it's also expected to set up several other stories, for which it doesn't seem to have been designed.

Notwithstanding those reservations, however, I enjoyed "Messiah Complex."  It was bouncy and it was energetic and it had momentum.  It was fun to read, and it left me more convinced than ever of the merits of a weekly schedule.  Dan Slott's Amazing Spider-Man book is also making a strong case for it.  If we're going to have multiple X-Men creative teams, I'd be very happy to see them all taking turns on a single book.  After all, that's effectively what they're doing at the moment - just in a very cluttered and incoherent way.

This isn't a classic story.  But it's a fun story, and one that's addressed, if not fully solved, the X-Men's lack of direction over the last couple of years.

Rating: B+

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