Over at X-Men, Peter Milligan - now the outgoing writer - is still pursuing his big storyline about Lorna's mysterious vision in space.  Except it's now segueing into an Apocalypse storyline.

The answer, rather bizarrely, is that Lorna has seen a Doop.  Or rather, another creature just like Doop, called Daap.  This would make reasonable sense if X-Statix had been a normal comic, but I'm extremely dubious about the wisdom of bringing X-Statix concepts into the X-Men, which is a completely different style of comic.  Especially Doop, who was about as weird as X-Statix got.

Basically, it's an issue of Lorna and Alex standing around next to an evil Doop in a Costa Rican jungle.  Lorna is enthralled and is irrationally convinced he's going to restore her powers; Alex is, presumably, meant to be jealous and bitter. It's fairly obvious that there's some sort of mind control going on here, but beyond that, heaven only knows where Milligan is heading with this.

Unfortunately, for the purposes of this two-parter, he's been saddled with Roger Cruz on art.  Cruz has been around for years and remains a workmanlike but thoroughly average artist.  In fairness, unlike many artists of his ilk, Cruz's characters at least have emotional range.  What they lack is emotional subtlety, which is what this story needed in order to make it work.  It's almost a mercy when Cruz gets to draw the Leper Queen, who has a blank mask and therefore can't overact.

We also get an origin story for the Leper Queen here, and it's a cute concept.  Obviously, she's mad.  Specifically, she blames mutants for the death of her kiddie, who was burned to death in a fire.  The twist is that her child was the mutant who started the fire.  The Leper Queen knows this full well, but is irrationally convinced that she was somehow infected by mutants who corrupted her poor innocent baby.  It's a nice idea, but the character still doesn't quite work.  I buy her motivations, but I don't yet buy the idea that she's been able to construct a movement around her.  Surely her followers, who are just commonplace bigots, would be deeply sceptical about following somebody so obviously unwell.  It doesn't ring true.

Ultimately, we've got the problem here that afflicts a lot of Peter Milligan stories - there's a sort of internal logic to it, but you have to be willing to accept that characters are going to act in weird and arbitrary ways.  I'm generally prepared to give him that leeway, but this issue isn't really funny either, and so it starts to tax my patience.

Oh, and there's a back-up strip.  For some strange reason, Marvel though that an issue of X-Men shipping in the last week of January would be the ideal spot for a Franklin Richards Christmas story.  Did somebody blow a deadline, or did they just forget to publish it?  Anyhow, it's sweet, but nothing you need to go out of your way to see.

Rating: B-

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