Written by Kieron Gillen
Penciled by Greg LandAfter the hammer-blow of FEAR ITSELF and the violence of SCHISM, it can’t go on. It’s the end of the Uncanny X-Men. And who better to provide a stirring eulogy than… MISTER SINISTER? Join us for the end of the industry-shaping series with the return of the 19th century’s finest morally dubious scientist.
I was sick this weekend, so most of my reviews this week are going up late. Perhaps sweating and shivering for a couple days enhanced the reading experience, but we’ll find out after the jump, won’t we?
“It was a simpler time, when much of humanity did not know about mutantkind and the dream seemed achievable. As the years went by, the burgeoning species faced death and biogtry on a scale they never would have dreamed possible.”
As a sort of frontispiece for the finale of Uncanny X-Men, Kieron Gillen repurposes the first page of X-Men #1 from back in ’63, daubing over the original narration with a cynical streak. These “everything ends — everything begins” stories from Marvel always tend to begin or end with some nostalgic reproduction of classic pages, but here, there’s a mocking sneer that may not come off completely as intended. Sure, it’s wry enough, but what it does better than anything else is point out just what a downer following the X-Men is. Every so often — even during the hallowed, beyond-reproach days of whenever you happened to be 15 — the X-Franchise has to pull its own bottom out and prove that there’s a more desperate, horrific new low for mutants to face. Back in the ’60s they had hunter-killer robots staring them down but it seemed almost progressive compared to now.
So this is the latest thing. Schism, or Regenesis, or whichever this is supposed to be part of. The new thing, until the next thing. That’s the problem with ending an era when you’ve just spent 3 months shoving the next era into the consumer’s face, one silhouette at a time. The grand finale has become the grand formality. Does this preclude it from being a good comic book off the top? No, of course not. It does, however, enervate expectations. If this isn’t the end, what can it be — how can it convince us that this moment matters as much as the last one did, or the next one will?
Gillen takes the high road and the low road at the same time. On the one hand, Mister Sinister floats around the issue, being cryptic and offering commentary on what’s happened. On the Sinister track, the X-Goings-On are important because he all but shouts at the reader, “This is important.” On the other, the centerpiece of the issue is a conversation between Cyclops and Iceman about where they once were and where they are now. This part works a lot better than some villain who’s been maybe-dead for the past five years rambling — the key moments in X-Men history are always grounded in the emotional relationships between the longstanding characters. (Even if Iceman has, unless I’m mistaken, more or less been a nonentity since Mike Carey gave him a feature in some X-Cetera miniseries years ago.) When Cyclops and Iceman have two farewells — one bitter, one ambiguous — the story works.
A pretty great “end of an era, excelsior” issue of Uncanny X-Men could have been jury-rigged from, say, the Iceman and Beast sequences in this issue, and the Storm one in X-Men: Regenesis.
At this point, Greg Land has been discussed so much and so often on the Internet that I probably just need to say “Greg Land drew this” and you could make up your own paragraph (with a user-controlled level of vitriol). I might have even said this last time I reviewed an issue of i; I seriously don’t remember, because net talk about Land is so same-y and circular that I can’t even be bothered to recall what I said, let alone anyone else. (“BLAH BLAH PORN FACE BLAH BLAH”) For my money, he’s still far from who I’d want to use on an issue selling stark emotional weight and the creases in lifelong friendships, but beyond diagonal-for-no-reason layouts, it’s straightforward and it does what’s asked of it. Gillen seems way more careful than Fraction when it comes to giving Land easily framed stuff that he can then spruce up with his personal style, as opposed to having to fit something crazy into a style not built to support it.
In the end, it’s hard to be too supportive of Uncanny X-Men #544, just like it’s hard to be too down on it. It exists because it has to — you can’t do Uncanny X-Men #1 without drawing a line under the old thing. But with all of the important developments to that end happening in other books, there’s not much left for this issue of i to do. We don’t even get a tearful montage of some of the regular cast leaving, because beyond Scott and Emma, I’m not really sure who the main cast of this book has been for the past couple years. Sometimes, when you’ve dug yourself into a hole, it’s best to just quickly and quietly climb back out. Let’s hope that’s what this was, because we won’t know for months yet.
Final Verdict: 6 – If it mattered to you, insert your own grade
