Back at the core titles, X-Men #193 completes the six-part "Supernovas", Mike Carey's first arc on the book.

The plot is actually quite straightforward.  Sabretooth shows up at the X-Men's door, on the run from a new group of villains called the Children of the Vault.  The Children want to kill off everyone who knows they exist, and they have a long term plan to take over the world.  There's nothing like the classics.  Rogue's unlikely new strike team - including a couple of ex-villains and some people she found in a hospital - get to fight them.

The story benefits hugely from re-reading as a whole, since Carey held off the big exposition about what the Children want until part 4.  The first half of the arc is built around the "who are these guys and what do they want" angle.  With the benefit of hindsight, the early chapters make a lot more sense - most notably, the big fight in the hospital that took up half of chapter 1 turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Children's plot.  It's actually foreshadowing for the Pandemic arc which starts next month.  This was all a little confusing on the first read, since Carey was doing "what the hell is going on here" foreshadowing for two unrelated plots at the same time, without actually signalling very clearly that they were different stories.  But it falls into place quite nicely on a re-read.

Overall, it's a mixed storyline, but it works more often than not.  The highly unlikely new team roster makes a surprising amount of sense in the context of Carey's story.  It's mainly Rogue's book, and the rest of the team are her choices.  And it's been a good long time since Rogue was defined by anything other than her relationship with Gambit, which makes this a refreshing change.  Carey's basic angle is that Rogue is either an unconventional tactical genius, or a reckless maniac on a streak of good luck.  Or maybe a bit of both.  There's method in her madness, at any rate, and so the bizarre collection of X-Men ends up working.  This seems to be the big idea for Carey's run, and I'm happy to follow along with that.

The Children of the Vault, on the other hand, are more hit and miss.  The concept here is that they've been kept in a vault for thirty years, but time runs faster in the vault, and their little community has lived through 6,000 years.  In theory they were meant to emerge when humanity was wiped out by ecological disaster, but they've been prematurely released by M-Day, and now they want to fulfil their destiny by getting rid of humanity and taking over the world.  (Quite why M-Day would release them isn't clear, but it seems to be a favoured all-purpose explanation these days.)  Since they've got millennia of extra technology on their side, they're effectively superhuman.

We've been down this road before.  A group claiming to be the next evolutionary stage for humanity is a natural foil for the X-Men since they're competing with the mutants.  Chris Claremont dabbled with the idea when he created the Neo, although he failed to make clear what made the Neo different from mutants.  Grant Morrison also used a very, very similar concept - well, let's be honest, exactly the same concept - as the origin story for Fantomex, although he presented it more as a factory for super-soldiers than a community.

In theory, the Children of the Vault are an improvement on this idea, because they're clearly distinct from the mutants - they rely on technology instead.  But if this is going to work, they really need to come across as a believable little society of their own. That's where they fall short at the moment; we never really see what the Children's world was like, and so when they suddenly announce that they're going to destroy the human race, it comes across as generic villainy.  There's potential in these characters, but if we're going to accept them as people who believe it's their destiny to wipe out humanity and take over the world, we really need to see more of their culture.

There are also some odd storytelling glitches here.  Chris Bachalo's art is generally as much of an obstruction as a charm, but the usual rule applies - the more he seems to be rushing (as measured by the number of inkers), the clearer the storytelling gets.  He There are six inkers credited on this issue, which is entirely readable.  Instead, the narrative glitches are more like a communications breakdown between artist and script.  What did the X-Men actually do to destroy the Children's machine at the start of the story, and how did Mystique impersonating Cable make any difference?  Why has Bachalo drawn a woman in red wearing a helmet alongside the Children at the start of the issue, even though the epilogue makes clear that she and the other Children aren't even present, and the dialogue actually has Sangre referring to "the five of us" (i.e. him, Serafina, Fuego, Perro and Aguja - helmet girl makes six)?  These just seem to be outright points of confusion about what's supposed to be happening, rather than Bachalo's usual problem of rendering a scene in a gratuitously obscure manner.

So it's a flawed story, but nonetheless an entertaining one with some fun action sequences.  Rogue's new team seem promising, and the Children have plenty of potential as recurring villains, with a little more work.  On the whole, good stuff.

Rating: B+

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