With the Diana fiasco finally behind us, X-Statix gets back to normal service with "The Cure."  This is a two-part story, plugging the gap until the book gets shifted over to Marvel Knights in April.

Vivisector is finally fed up of being a mutant, and hires a slightly dodgy scientist to get rid of his powers.  Unusually for this sort of story, it actually works.  But Vivisector's whole life is built around his celebrity, and now that he's no longer eligible to be in X-Statix, everything starts to fall apart for him.

In fact, the plot here is surprisingly normal.  You could do this story, without much change required, in any of the other X-books.  There's a slight shift of emphasis, in that the usual argument against doing this is that the mutant in question is betraying his identity.  For Myles, the powers themselves aren't really an issue, so much as the lifestyle he could have because of them.  That's his identity, and that's what he loses here.  When he tries to assert his unique character traits (ie, gay and intellectual), he finds that they don't get him very far without his generic mutant powers.

Nonetheless, it's a shift of emphasis rather than anything that takes the story drastically out of the norm.  As a result, the central story seems surprisingly conservative for this book.  The usual self-conscious weirdness is still there, but not really involved in the plot.  For example, there's a hilarious sequence with Lacuna's show ploughing gamely on despite her coma - and filling the show with faith healers attempting to revive her.  "Tonight, Lacuna is fighting for her life in front of you, her loyal fans!"

And Milligan plays games with the readers again, hinting that he's going to be doing a story about Myles seeking a cure for his homosexuality.  Problem is, the story then comes as a bit of an anticlimax.

Whatever else you say about X-Statix, it certainly doesn't buy into the decompression fad.  The title almost seems to be operating on fast forward, so busy throwing out ideas that it rattles through the story at absolutely breakneck pace.  The conscious artificiality of the book lets it get away with this sort of thing; in most books, to rush into this story in just one issue would seem ludicrously undermotivated.  In X-Statix, it's just the way things work for these strange characters.

A good story with some great moments, but taken as a whole, it seems a little subdued for an X-Statix story.

Rating: B

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