Also ending their run, and rather more definitively, Peter Milligan and Salvador Larroca say goodbye to X-Men.  Larroca is off to work with Warren Ellis on Newuniversal - not the most obvious pairing, but we'll see how it turns out - while Milligan is presumably headed back to his usual cult audience.

Now, I've quite enjoyed some of Milligan's run, although god knows it's been infuriatingly inconsistent.  The closing "Blood of Apocalypse" arc came nearest to clicking, with an appropriately melodramatic action story straight out of the nineties in the foreground, while Milligan amused himself with the demented Apocalypse.  Sure, the Gambit fans are probably up in arms about it, but for heaven's sake, we did basically the same storyline twenty years ago with Angel, and that wasn't the end of the world.  Relax, people.

Having said all that, I'd be the first to agree that Peter Milligan was not a good choice to write X-Men.  The man is a cult writer, and he's at his best when given free rein to follow his bizarre ideas to their logical conclusion in a title that doesn't have to worry about commercial appeal or conventional standards of plausibility.  If you put him on a standard superhero title, though, the result tends to be awkward - the genre isn't his strong point, and mainstream audiences tend to find his postmodern alienation schtick... well, a little too alienating.  I like it, but I'm fully aware that it's a minority taste, and I certainly wouldn't have hired him for this assignment.  Besides, I'd rather read him working on something else where he can really cut loose.

And even allowing for that, there are bits of his X-Men stories that are just plain clunky.  It's one thing for Sunfire to deliver tongue-in-cheek dialogue like "What do any of us do?  Fight, make up, plot scheme, fight some more."  That's quirky self-awareness.  But when Emma Frost is saying things like "We won't know who or what she is until she emerges from the dark night that engulfs her" - that's just bad.

Still, I've generally enjoyed this closing arc, and suspect that the story is the precisely the sort of thing a lot of X-Men fans would have liked more if it was delivered in a more normal style.  The plot ideas are all perfectly reasonable, once you look beneath the surface.

As for the art, this isn't exactly Larroca's best work.  Even the colourist can't seem to keep track of who's who, and that's hardly surprising given that characters seem to just turn up from nowhere halfway through scene.  Then again, it's not helped by some glaring colouring errors that should have been easily caught.  Mistaking Emma Frost for Gambit - despite the high-heeled boots and the dialogue - is an eyebrow-raising one.

I suspect most X-Men fans will be delighted to see the back of this creative team.  I'm much more positive about this run, but I still think Milligan was a wildly ill-advised choice for the book.  Still, I enjoyed it.

Oh, yes - there's a back-up strip, which also appears in Young Avengers #12, featuring a character called the Masked Marvel.  This was originally solicited to be in the next issue, but somehow it's ended up here.  Pleasingly, it seems to have displaced all the adverts.  The Masked Marvel is secretly a comic book writer and he's pitching his own series to Marvel Comics.  The story itself is clearly a pilot for some future story, and frankly, it's all a bit twee.  I'm sure they loved it in the office, but I can't really imagine wanting to read a monthly series about a Karl Kesel stand-in fighting crime and arguing with his real-life editor.  It might be mildly amusing as some sort of industry satire, but here it's played more or less straight, and the appeal escapes me.

Rating: B+

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