We have three X-books this week, but once again, they're all in mid-storyline.  That means I have to pick one to fulfil the X-quota.  So let's do Young X-Men #4.  It's nominally the most important of the three, and besides, I haven't reviewed it in full since issue #1.

Young X-Men is the latest in a stream of titles about trainee X-Men.  From Generation X to New Mutants to New X-Men to the revamped New X-Men to this book... we've had try after try at making this format work.  Apparently somebody at Marvel really, really likes this "junior team" concept - but not the actual books that have resulted from it.

Will Young X-Men be any different?  Well, it's hard to say, because four issues in, we're still caught up in an opening storyline based around a piece of misdirection.  As pretty much everyone figured out a while ago, the Young X-Men are a team of junior mutants recruited by a bad guy posing as Cyclops.  Clearly that's not going to be the premise of the series, so in effect, four issues in, we still don't know what the book is actually about.  Well, except that it's about the junior team - like all those titles that came before it.

Now, I quite like the creators on this book.  Marc Guggenheim is a bit hit and miss, but some of his Wolverine stories were good fun, and his contributions to Amazing Spider-Man have been entertaining.  Yanick Paquette is an above average storyteller, and fine for a book of this sort.  And I quite like some of the cast they're using here.  Rockslide, the world's dumbest superhero, is a fun character.  Ink is starting to show signs of being promising.

But what we're missing is a core idea of what the series is about.  There's not much to invest in here.  The team is plainly going to turn into something else in a few issues time, and there's nothing particularly gripping going on in the meantime.  There's some running around and fighting, and there's a half-hearted echo of the first New Mutants story, but what's it about?  I get the feeling of filler.  And that's not a good impression for a first arc to give.

It occurs to me that this title might be suffering from the need to play along with "Divided We Stand."  Marvel wanted to launch the book out of the "Messiah Complex" crossover - but the new San Francisco setting wasn't available until this month.  That might explain the book playing for time for a few months, before unveiling its actual concept.  But if so, they'd probably have been better off waiting to launch the title, and using the intervening months to give New X-Men a proper ending.

It's also a questionable decision to do "bad guy impersonates Cyclops" bang in the middle of Secret Invasion.  Surely that plot ought to be off-limits to everyone else for now?

Anyway, I'm not giving up hope on this book just yet.  It's always possible that it could pick up once we get down to business.  But as an opening story, I'm afraid this isn't getting the job done.

Rating: C+

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