Rounding off this week's X-books, Chuck Austen takes over X-Men.  Or rather, he took it over two issues ago, but it's called X-Men now and this is the first one that counts.  For some reason.

Maybe I'm in an unusually charitable mood after venting my spleen against Excalibur, but actually, this isn't too bad.  Okay, Xorn turns up on the last page, but if they're simply going to do the routine where Xorn turns out to have been a real character rather than a complete invention, then I don't have a particular problem with that.  As long as they don't drive a coach and horses through Morrison's meticulous plotting - which, frankly, is a damn sight more important to me than anything happening in the X-books at the moment.

For the most part, it's another tour issue for new readers - and really, was there a pressing need to do this in both X-Men and New X-Men in the same week?  Havok gives Josh Guthrie a tour of the facility, and in the manner of these things, there follows an infodump so large that it ought to incur a landfill tax. 

The central idea is that Scott has just finished reassigning everyone to different teams, and absolutely nobody is pleased to be on Havok's squad.  Rogue and Gambit were kind of hoping to take some time off (er, why don't they,then?), Wolverine thinks it's ridiculous that he's been put on all the teams at once (okay, that's cute), and Iceman and Havok are still squabbling about Annie.  Juggernaut's happy to be there but, as Emma points out, he doesn't really care as long as he's being fed. 

Standard soap opera, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of this.  Alex's newfound jealousy for Bobby, months after the two of them broke up, seems to come out of the blue, and poor Annie still can't get through a scene without inviting somebody to have sex with her.  She should see somebody about that.  But as a stage-setting issue, this is actually okay.  And there's some decent comic timing in the reveal that Scott's office is besieged by all the characters from other comics complaining about Reload as well.

Salvador Larroca's artwork is up to its usual impressive standards. The school looks good, the Chinese landscape is lovely, and the double-page spread in Scott's office is nicely done.  I wish they'd get rid of that awful costume Havok's wearing, but otherwise, it's a great issue to look at.

Perfectly acceptable.  Not much happens, but then it's a recap issue for newcomers, so what do you expect?  It does the job.

Rating: B

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