Thursday, October 6, 2011

X-Men Schism #5 (of 5)

As seen in this final issue of X-Men Schism, apparently Cyclops and Wolverine are, together, the stupidest heroes around.

As this issue begins, a gigantic Sentinel is walking across the bay / harbor / ocean / whatever to attack the X-Men's home island called Utopia. It plans to kill all the mutants it finds.

So of course, as it approaches, the two heroes decide instead to fight each other in a no-holds-barred match.

The point of the story, of course, is to split the massive X-Family up into smaller teams that can more easily fill the dozen or so X-books that are about to relaunch.

As with the other issues in the series, the artwork is great. Here it's provided by Adam Kubert and Mark Roslan, and they provide some amazing visuals. The only problem is, writer Jason Aaron decided to let a good part of the book go without any dialogue - so there are several panels where I'm not sure what's going on. Sometimes a few words can be helpful.

The series accomplishes its goals - it resets the Hellfire Club (as a laughable home for villainous tykes), it splits the team up (with Wolverine announcing his reason for leaving, taking some of the X-Men with him, and then going off to do the exact same thing he was complaining about), and it sets up a bunch of new comics. Because there aren't enough X-titles to go around right now.

Surely all that could have been accomplished without this five issue series, and then at least we could pretend Cyke and Logan were intelligent. Ah well.

With the upcoming reboot and renumbering, is it time to jump off the X-Men bandwagon? We'll talk about that in two weeks.

Grade: B

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