Finally, and at long last, Peter Milligan takes over X-Men.

Now, I was deliberately keeping my hopes low for this issue.  Because Peter Milligan can be a very inconsistent writer, depending largely on what he's being hired to do.  If you give him completely free rein, you can end up with something inspired like X-Statix.  But his back catalogue is also littered with odd misfiring superhero books, usually those where he was trying to play it straight.

That's what I was bracing myself for, and that's kind of what we've got here.  This is Peter Milligan writing the X-Men and doing it straight.  If you're looking for X-Statix then you're going to be very disappointed.  The good news is that it's a quantum leap up from Chuck Austen, by virtue of having a solid central concept and making reasonable sense.  A community of mutants hiding away in the Antarctic have either killed themselves or torn one another apart after the influence of something called Golgotha.  The X-Men must investigate.  Good enough starting point.

The characters also take a turn for the better.  Milligan isn't trying to impose any radical new interpretation of the heroes, simply to make a little more sense of what was already underway.  Having been lumbered with the X-Men's bozo squad, he works with what he's been given - a team comprising one on-and-off couple and a romantic triangle.  And, at long last, people are finally reacting appropriately to Polaris's violent excesses.  About time.

But the bad news is that the first issue story isn't very inspired - we've been here many times before - and the execution isn't too good.  It boils down to the X-Men wandering around a darkened complex while being periodically attacked by faceless nobodies.  The pacing is extremely shaky, with the ends of fights skipped over.  Some of the visuals are tricky to follow as well - for example, a character suddenly appearing in a tunnel because the script requires Polaris to crush him, when he was in a different location only panels before.  And the tunnel is coloured so differently that it looks at first like a scene change.

The issue is full of niggles like this.  It's an okay idea, done... passably, but no more.  This still represents a major step up, and it's encouraging to note that all the problems lie in the execution rather than the underlying ideas - there's nothing wrong with this issue that can't be fixed.

Rating: B-

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