Finally for this week's X-books, X-Men wraps up "Bizarre Love Triangle."

God, Peter Milligan's run on this book is frustrating.  You can see where he's coming from, and the ideas are often interesting.  But it's melodramatic soap opera filtered through Milligan's unusual sensibilities, and the result is a downright strange book.  On one level, it's a comic which is more about the ideas than about the actual characters.  On another, it's a book where everybody acts in the slightly stilted fashion of X-Statix, only here, it's not meant to be funny.

Milligan's writing is very much an acquired taste.  And strangely, it's often easier to digest in his weirder comics, where the whole thing is utterly divorced from reality.  In that sort of context, it seems almost natural for the characters to be acting in a slightly artificial way.  In a more straightforward soap like this, it actually feels weirder.  It clashes.  The thrust of what the characters are doing isn't particularly unusual, but Milligan seems compelled to keep up the ironic distance.  When a soap character asks "Do you have any idea what that did to me?", the usual answer is not "At a guess, I'd say a complex set of conflicting emotions."  Much depends on whether you find this sort of thing amusing, or whether it just makes you want to throttle Milligan.  I rather like it, but I can easily see why somebody might not.

It's worth pointing out that, although it did have a villain in the form of Mystique, "Bizarre Love Triangle" has basically been four straight issues of the X-Men sitting around the Mansion and chatting about their relationships.  It's really a bit long for that sort of thing, especially when you consider that the arc ends with Mystique running off into the night, positioning this more as the first stage in a longer-term storyline.  Four straight issues of soap is surely pushing it.

But Milligan does write a very good scene with the X-Men voting on Mystique's petition for membership, which actually gives everyone something to do.  Strangely enough, the one thing nobody really gets into is whether Mystique's application is sincere, but there are plenty of other nice points being made.  It's also a pleasant change to see one of the X-Men books actually acknowledge the existence of the other two teams for something more than a cameo, as Nightcrawler duly turns up to react to his mother's arrival.

I'm torn on this one, really.  It's deeply flawed, it goes on too long, and it'll probably annoy the hell out of at least half of the audience.  But I really do find myself enjoying it, in spite of everything.

Rating: A-

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