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Peter Milligan's run on X-Men has
been remarkably variable in quality so far. Most
writers, at worst, vary in quality from story to story or from
book to book. Milligan is usually the same.
But his X-Men fluctuates all over
the place, depending largely on whether the issue involves
characters or plot. He's pretty good on the characters,
even if they sometimes have a dash of ironic distance to them.
He's not so good at the plotting - straight ahead superhero
stories just aren't really his forte. With "Golgotha",
the result was a story of incredible inconsistent quality.
His second arc, "Bizarre Love Triangle",
gets off to a more promising start. That might be
because it's basically a character story, and plays more to
his strengths.
A previously unknown new mutant calling
herself Foxx turns up at the school after shaking off hunters.
We're apparently meant to regard her as unbelievably beautiful
(although frankly, I'm not seeing it, myself). She gets
shoved into Gambit's class, and promptly sets about seducing
him in the least subtle manner conceivable. Meanwhile,
Emma Frost is trying to help Gambit and Rogue touch each other
in a sort of telepathic virtual reality, and that's not going
too well either.
The mystery here is who Foxx actually is,
since it's pretty obvious that there's more to her than meets
the eye. Just in case anyone hasn't picked up on that,
Milligan throws in the "You have needs that my... needs that
Rogue cannot satisfy" line. This being Milligan, she's
presumably either a shapechanger (that'd be Mystique, then) or
some sort of mental projection from Emma's telepathic
experiments. Of course in either event there's the
obvious question of why the telepaths don't rumble her
immediately, but then Emma Frost turns up at the start and
seems to have some very clear ideas of what she's doing by
putting Foxx in Gambit's class, so Milligan's presumably
thought of all that.
The art is generally pretty decent,
although it really doesn't sell me on the supposed
attractiveness of Foxx. The characters are kept
reasonably three-dimensional, and actually seem to be aware of
events in other books for once. Although from a
scheduling point of view, was it really necessary to clarify
at this stage that the story takes place after the current
Rogue storyline, thus blowing the cliffhanger from issue
#11? It could easily have been left ambiguous until next
issue, by which point it wouldn't have been a problem.
A good issue, though. Milligan gets
my hopes up again. But of course, we've been here
before...
Rating: A-
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