According to the inducia, X-Men Unlimited is now coming out sixteen times a year, a prospect which can only terrify those of us who always thought they were mightily struggling to fill four issues a year.  Quite what the point of the title is meant to be remains something of a mystery - with no obvious theme to this issue, it seems to be a generic dumping bin for short stories featuring characters who are in the X-books.  Or, you know, are at least mutants.  Anything, basically.

Issue #41 is not one of the better advertisements for X-Men Unlimited's existence, offering one mediocrity, one story entirely dependent on a forty-year-old film reference, and one perfectly good story which can't justify the purchase price on its own.

To begin with the mediocrity, Chuck Austen and Skottie Young give us an Exiles story in which Nocturne and Blink break Wolverine out of jail for, well, something or other.  Austen never makes it entirely clear what the point of the mission was - presumably to get Wolverine to fight the spider demon thingie, but it's unclear why I'm meant to be worked up about the mere fact that they fight.  There's a nice idea based on Blink and Nocturne never having seen Wolverine in action before, but it doesn't go anywhere.  Peter Parker appears as an abused child in the obligatory Exiles gratuitous reference to a pre-existing character, and the issue end with the implication that he's been left infected with some sort of demon eggs in a heavyhanded metaphor for the psychological scars of abusive childhoods.

There are individually good ideas in this story, but they're never fully pursued, and the result is a mismatch of ill-fitting ideas that combine to make very little impression.  Art comes from Skottie Young, an artist who Marvel clearly have faith in, given that they're assigning him the upcoming Human Torch ongoing title.  Young is one of those artists with an exaggerated and distorted style that won't appeal to readers with more traditional tastes, making him a curious choice of artist for a Karl Kesel series about a member of the Fantastic Four.  I quite like the visual style of this issue, though - the storytelling's pretty good, and the distortions are largely effective in putting over the character moments.  His Wolverine is a little over the top, and seems based primarily on Sam Kieth's interpretation.  But while it certainly won't be to everyone's taste, the art works for me on this story.

Next up, "Hard Day's Fight" is an X-Statix story - a rare appearance of these rather erratic characters outside the confines of their own series.  From memory, actual appearances of X-Statix outside their title consist of an ineffectual guest appearance in the final issue of Brotherhood, and a cameo along with half the Marvel Universe in an issue of Thunderbolts.  This, however, is a story co-written by the title's regular artist Mike Allred, which is a rather different proposition.  I'm not familiar with co-writer and artist Nick Derington, although I gather he's been doing some back-up strips in Savage Dragon.

Anyhow, the story has the four male members of X-Statix (Guy, Tike, Myles and Phat) on one of their promotional tours.  The high concept here is that the story is patterned on the Beatles' 1964 film A Hard Day's Night.  I've seen the opening ten minutes or so of that film, which was about all I could be bothered with.  Consequently, that unpleasant noise in the background is the sound of a massive film-reference joke hurtling over my head, crashing into the wall behind me, and landing in a bloodied, whimpering heap on the floor.  Quite simply, if you don't know the film, you're wasting your time reading this.  It doesn't have much to offer as a story in its own right.  And I have to question what proportion of X-Men Unlimited's readers are really likely to be that familiar with A Hard Day's Night.  It's almost forty years old, for god's sake.  I'm sure most readers have heard of the film and many will know the general thrust, but expecting them to recognise references to specific plot elements is just not realistic.

Finally, we've got this issue's token good story, "Something in the Air" by Jamie Delano and Neil Googe.  This is a fourteen-page short about a teenage boy who's able to project his emotions through his pheromones.  It's essentially the same concept as Stacy X's powers in Uncanny X-Men, but Delano gets a stronger fourteen-page story out of it than we've seen with Stacy.  It's simple, straightforward, and amusing.  Good enough for me.  Hit the idea, work it through, and get out of there before it gets dull.

Neil Googe makes a somewhat surprising appearance on art.  Surprising, because you might have thought Googe would be better off devoting his time to his own series Bazooka Jules, now running many months late.  Nonetheless, Googe is an excellent choice for this story.  Despite his cheesecake tendencies, his characters have a cartoon feel which fits the ridiculous exaggerated emotions of the story, while still retaining a three-dimensionality that's often lacking in that sort of art.  And his layouts on the crowd scenes are excellent - the final page of Milo being lynched by his audience is just wonderful.  Googe really ought to be focussing on his own title, but there's no denying the quality of the work here.

It's a good little story, but nothing that can justify the purchase price of the package as a whole.  Perhaps worth considering if you're an X-Statix fan with a detailed knowledge of the plot of A Hard Day's Night.

Rating: B-

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