X-Men celebrates its two hundredth issue, and the start of the "Endangered Species" back-up crossover, with a comic that ships in the same week as six other X-books, because Marvel are idiots.  I just thought that point was worth making again.

Actually, though, this is a fun little book.  Mike Carey is continuing to write the X-Men straight.  In this story, they retreat to Rogue's old home to help her deal with her latest mental problems, only to come under attack from the Marauders.  The Marauders' heyday was twenty years ago, but after so many years of people trying to reinvent the wheel, there's something rather pleasant and familiar about Carey going back to such thoroughly old-school X-Men villains.  Even the Malice choker is back.

The art is divided between Chris Bachalo and Humberto Ramos, with Ramos taking the main story, while Bachalo has the scenes that are repeated in Cable & Deadpool.  The co-ordination, by the way, is less than perfect - this issue stubbornly insists that there are only two people alive on Providence, even though C&D plainly shows five.  Perhaps it's trivial, but if you're going to go for the "repeated scenes" structure and show the same events from two perspectives, they really should match.  It's kind of the point, after all.

In practice, most of the book is Ramos, which is fine by me.  He's a clearer artist, and better at emotion.  He's also wildly over the top, but then it's a melodramatic sort of story.  This is quite clearly Carey trying to write an X-Men story, rather than Carey trying to impose his own identity on the X-Men - but he does it very well, and I'm happy to read it.

In the broader scheme of things, I admit, I'm not wholly sure about some of this.  Carey went to the trouble of introducing an oddball team with weird members like Sabretooth and Mystique.  Over the course of a couple of issues that's essentially been dismantled, in a way that never seemed to really get to grips with the potential of the story (and makes Rogue look a bit dim for recruiting all these people in the first place).  It comes across more as a rethink than as a pay-off.

Even so, it's fun.  The back-up strip, beginning "Endangered Species", is also a success.  It's got nothing whatsoever to do with the Endangered Species one-shot, mind you.  It's basically a recap story bringing people up to speed on the M-Day concept, in which the Beast tries to persuade various supervillains to help him out.  I like this concept - having run out of conventional avenues in stories that were apparently too boring to show us, Hank is now turning to the maniacs.  There's a story in that.

What gives me hope for this book is that Mike Carey seems to have a much stronger sense than any other recent writers of the X-Men's identity, and he's really trying to get back to the qualities that made the X-Men work in the eighties.  This is one of his successes..

Rating: A

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