X-Men Unlimited provides another two stories which, to be honest, you could miss without losing much sleep.  They're not bad by any means - both are solidly okay.  But since there's already a ton of X-Men material out there, most potential readers may feel they're already perfectly well sated.

The theme of this title and its sister book Spider-Man Unlimited is to try out new writers.  Jai Nitz isn't a complete newcomer to Marvel - he's previously done a Mr Fantastic story for Marvel Double Shot.  Close enough, though.  Bravely, Nitz has a crack at doing a full Gambit spy story in 11 pages, which means really packing in the plot.  Lots of seven-panel pages here.

But it's a nicely paced story, and there's a cute idea where poor Gambit is forced to use his casino chips as the only available ammunition, so that every use of his powers sets him back thousands of dollars.  Georges Jeanty is a solid storyteller who works well on this sort of dense story.  I don't for a moment buy the idea of the macguffin (a computer program which will supposedly help third world countries get out of debt by balancing their budgets), but overall, this isn't at all bad.

Former editor Mike Raicht turns up to write a story about Cannonball and his brother Josh.  Of course, we're now calling Josh "Jay", and it seems he's getting the codename "Icarus."  Could be worse, I suppose.

Given that Jay is being brought into the books as a recurring character, there's an obvious need to establish his relationship to Sam.  Thus far, he hasn't really got one.  That's the real point of this story, and Raicht does quite a good job of laying out Jay's ambivolence about Sam.  The "Hey, you could be an X-Man too one day" stuff is rather corny and not really justified by the plot, but there's some fairly solid character work here.  Staz Johnson does some understated but effective artwork, with some nice flight scenes.

All told, a perfectly good issue.  You don't need it, but it does the job.

Rating: B

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