And finally for this week, X-Men #173, continuing the appropriately-titled "Bizarre Love Triangle" storyline.  This is another one where the previous issue came out in a week I skipped, but really, you get the general idea from the title. 

Mystique has come to the Mansion disguising herself as a new mutant called Foxx, and she's set about seducing Gambit in an attempt to break him and Rogue up.  Meanwhile, Havok has decided that he's in love with Polaris after all, despite dumping her at the altar during the Chuck Austen run.

It's soap opera melodrama, in other words, which was the lifeblood of the X-books throughout the 1990s.  However, this time it's filtered through the sensibilities of Peter Milligan.  That means that the whole thing takes on a slightly stylised quality, with characters acting in a slightly artificial way.  Milligan has always been more interested in the themes of his stories than in literal plausibility, and with material like this, a lot depends on how far you're prepared to run with him.  I like it, but the staginess of his style isn't to everyone's taste.

The real oddity here is Mystique herself, whose motivations seem decidedly obscure, especially when she suddenly announces that she wants to join the X-Men (although she might just be trying to dig herself out of a hole).  Mystique is here to disrupt things and to represent themes, more than to be an actual believable character.  And it works just fine if you're willing to take it on that level.

Four issues for this arc may be pushing it, though.  Although we do get a token action sequence, it really does come down to four straight issues of the X-Men chatting to one another in the Mansion.  It's hard to shake the feeling that this could have been done much more tightly and effectively in three, or even two, issues.  Of course, then it wouldn't have been long enough to fill a trade paperback, but so what?  Run something else in the extra space and do a trade with more than one story.  Exiles does it all the time.  This is a story which ideally needs to be kept compact, if only because the longer it runs, the shakier the credibility problems become.

For all that, though, I liked the issue.  Lorna's finally getting some good scenes for the first time in years, and there's a nice touch with Emma Frost realising that Gambit's only feigning surprise about Foxx's real identity - a cute way of using telepathy.  It won't be to all tastes, but I'm enjoying it.

Rating: A-

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