By: Louise Simonson & Chris Claremont (writers), Doug Braithwaite (art), Dave Sharpe (letters), Rob Schwager (colors) & Mark Paniccia (editor)
The Story: Some dead X-Men find themselves brought back to life and thrust into the Chaos War.
What’s Good: The art looks very nice. If you’re not familiar with Doug Braithwaite, he’ll remind you a little of Alex Ross. He definitely falls into the more realistic school of art and what strikes you most about his linework is how anatomically correct his characters are. All of the muscles, contours, facial wrinkles, etc. are all as they’d appear on real humans. Then he combines that with a very nuanced inked shading. These inks combine with Schwager’s colors to give some pages an almost painted look. The end result is very nice.
What’s Not So Good: This issue is credited to Claremont, Simonson & Braithwaite without any indication as to who wrote and who handled art duties. I’m assuming that means that Braithwaite had some input on the story and that one or the other of Claremont and Simonson only helped in the most conceptual manner. But, it could also be that no one really wanted to take credit for this story because it is not very good.
The general concept of Chaos War is that the Chaos King has destroyed death. This allows all of the dead to come back to life. At the same time, the Chaos King has struck down all mortal heroes into a coma of sorts. So, while the godly characters of the Marvel U are fighting the Chaos King in the main part of the event, some of these back-from-the-dead heroes are trying to do little bits to help here on Earth. This formula has given us a really good Dead Avengers miniseries and a fun Alpha Flight one-shot. But, that magic was missing from this issue.
For one thing, the mutants who come back aren’t very interesting. This was a problem with the Necrosha “event” last fall too: None of these dead mutants are anyone that we missed, so why would we care about a story with them? The most prominent dead mutant is Phoenix and while there might be some teases about her in this issue, she does not make an appearance. We also don’t get to see Nightcrawler, who died last summer in Second Coming. What we DO get are Thunderbird who has been dead since Uncanny #95 (I think), Banshee, Moria MacTaggert, a few Maddrox duplicates and the two dead Stepford Cuckoos. Honestly, no one cares about any of these characters and unless you already know who they are, you’re going to be confused because the writers don’t explain much.
Then the central conflict for this issue is that these mutants are attacked by birds. Granted they are some kind of super-crows that are powered by some kind of bird god that is tied into Thunderbirds Apache heritage, but that hardly matters: The story remains X-Men versus birds.
Adding insult to injury, this story doesn’t even feel very connected to the Chaos War event.
Conclusion: When you go “all-in” on an event like I have with Chaos War, you know that some tie-ins will be gems (Dead Avengers) and some will stink. Unfortunately, this is one of the stories that stinks. Doug Braithwaite does do a very nice job with the art, but when the story is this lacking good art isn’t enough.
Grade: D
-Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion