It's Sunday evening and I've still got a pile of comics staring at me accusingly.  Don't be surprised if some of this week's books turn up in next week's capsule reviews.  Luckily for me, although there are five X-books out this week, four of them are in mid-storyline.  The other one, which gets a full review, is X-Men Unlimited #14.

Incidentally, I note that Joe Quesada is now fending off questions about the cancellation of X-Men Unlimited and its sister title Spider-Man Unlimited.  The official line is that they're going to "morph into something", but it sounds as though Marvel have finally resigned themselves to the fact that the relatively dismal sales on both these titles make them an uneconomic way of breaking new talent - as well as overstretching two brands they ought to be jealously protecting.  Speaking broadly, there's no selling point for either of these titles beyond "Yet another comic starring the X-Men/Spider-Man", and the modern audience simply isn't completist enough for that.  A drastic rethink is needed here; if the aim is to promote new talent (or, as with Amazing Fantasy, new characters), they'd probably achieve more by putting it in a split book with a story that people actually want to read.

In fairness, the actual quality control on X-Men Unlimited generally isn't that bad.  At least it displays some commitment to proper character pieces, rather than the "will this do?" mentality which was all too often apparent in the book's previous incarnation.  But it's still an incredibly limiting format - nothing can ever really happen, and many stories suffer because the creators' interpretation of the title character is plainly not shared by the writer who actually controls him.

This month's issue is fairly typical.  Colossus is the star, and we've got two stories largely concerned with the depths of his misery.  CB Cebulski and David Aja's "Dying Inside" (yes, it's subtle, isn't it?) revisits Peter's relationship with Magik, who wants to go back in time and stop the Morlock Massacre.  There's an awkward attempt to mislead us into thinking that the framing sequence is somebody visiting Colossus' grave, and the whole thing suffers from the minor problem that it's blatantly impossible: Colossus was written out of the book because of the Morlock Massacre, so he was never around to have any of the conversations shown in his story.  Which, really, should have been picked up.  (You can just about shoehorn it in between pages of New Mutants #46, if you can live with the story taking place while the Massacre is still going on.  But that's as good as it gets.)  I'll ask again - what is the point of playing off old stories if you're not even going to get them right?

It's visually striking but I confess to being entirely unsure what point it's trying to make, beyond the fact that Colossus is very miserable.  Loosely, Peter feels guilty for telling Illyana that death is final, but the significance of this eludes me entirely.  It's not as if this advice ever got Illyana into trouble.  The last page, in which Peter kneels before Illyana's grave in a rainstorm and delivers such dialogue as "But look at me now, kneeling here before your grave, in the flesh, breathing again, while you remain locked in death's cold embrace", is difficult to excuse.  Too melodramatic, too fuzzy in its point.

Somewhat more successful is "How to be an Artist" by Neil Kleid and Mike Oeming, which is basically about Peter fending off his pretentious art teacher and trying to work out how to express his angst in the form of art.  There was a time when Peter's sketching was used to tell us all that he had the soul of a poet; nowadays, it's mainly used to let him draw nightmarish pictures which other characters can react to.  Kleid tries to make some sense of this side of the character, and to give him a clearer artistic agenda.  He basically wants to make beautiful pictures as an escape, but doesn't have any particularly beautiful sentiments to express any more.

It's not the most exciting story ever written and, despite being rather more subtle than the lead strip, it's still suffocating under an industrial quantity of angst.  Why did anybody ever think it was a good idea to make Colossus so miserable in the first place?  We've had 15 years of writers trying to follow through logically on the traumas that have been inflicted on the poor bastard; can we please, for god's sake, let him cheer up a bit and get back to the lighter and more innocent sides of the character that gave him his appeal in the first place?  He's boring when he's miserable.

Nonetheless, Kleid is at least trying to make something of Colossus' misery.  And he scores points for avoiding the obvious ending, which would be to have Peter unveil a work of unbearably moving genius.  In fact, he ends up producing something very personal, but which isn't necessarily very good.  We're left to make up our own minds about that, which is a pleasant change for this sort of story.  Mike Oeming also deserves credit for some lovely illustrations from Peter's sketchbook, which let him break from his normal style for a bit.

A middling issue; both stories are at least trying to make something of the character in his present form, but they're hamstrung by the fact that he's just a big dull ball of angst.  The back-up strip is better through being more subtle, but really, the main thing I take from this issue is that the character desperately, desperately needs a major overhaul.

Rating: B-

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