Finally, Chuck Austen's X-Men #162.  There may not be many X-books out this week, but that hasn't exactly raised the average standard.

This is a relatively straightforward action story, apparently intended to wrap up Austen's remaining storylines.  It's pretty clear where we're heading here.  The Juggernaut tells the Brotherhood that he's been faking all along, and was spying on the X-Men.  However, it's pretty clear that this is a double-bluff.  Austen seems to be heading to the idea that Juggernaut was faking originally, but then reformed for real, and now he's playing along with the original plan.  Fine.  Nothing wrong with that.

It also allows Austen to wrap up the subplot of Juggernaut's friendship with Sammy Pare, quite definitively, and with a neat enough scene where Juggernaut fails to break character in time to save Sammy, or let him know what's going on.  That actually works.

But as you'd expect, the issue is not without its problems.  There's a horrifically garbled attempt to explain the multiple Xorns, which strongly suggests that either Austen or his editors never really understood Morrison's storyline in the first place.  (The original Xorn didn't really have healing powers, for example.  Have the X-Men really not picked up on that yet?)  That whole storyline is a mess that would have been better left untouched, and one can only marvel at the inanity that led Marvel to think that this would satisfy anyone.  Even if you actually wanted Xorn back as a separate character, this isn't even the same guy!

The Brotherhood's whole agenda amounts to little more than "show up on the X-Men's doorstep and kill them."  That would have been regarded as a bit thin even in the sixties.  And even though their leader is Exodus, an ultra-powerful telepath, he seems not to notice that his team has two traitors. 

Still, by Austen's standards this ranks as relatively inoffensive, and it does have quite nice art.  We've seen worse.

Rating: C

back | continue