Review by Karl Verhoven

The Fallen Angels title had been dormant for decades at Marvel before being revived for these self-contained six chapters released in the wake of the X-Men’s 2019 reconfiguration.

Whether or not you like Fallen Angels is going to depend greatly on your tolerance for Bryan Hill’s form of writing. He’s a great fan of florid descriptive passages, with that style extending to the dialogue, as supplied on the sample art. There are continual hollow soundbites like “Civilisation is a lie. A world built on the weakness in the spirits of men” or “Balance is achieved through violence”. Those gems are both on the same page, the purple prose actually lettered in purple, and similar morbid aphorisms just keep on coming. It’s the type of pithy dialogue that can sound good as it flashes by in a movie, but is laughable when there’s time to consider it on the printed page. Hill even has a self-awareness about this, having X-23 say she doesn’t know what one of Psylocke’s snarky contradictory maxims means.

Because Hill concentrates so much on impressing with words, he doesn’t consider there may be readers who fancy a self-contained story teaming Cable, Psylocke and X-23, but who may not be aware of Psylocke’s complicated back story. Anyone who doesn’t know is going to be completely lost over this exploration of her past in organised crime.

Szymon Kudranski is technically an excellent artist, but action series don’t make the best use of his talents. He’s great at a moody portrait, or a shadowy location, and his technology designs are innovative, but when it comes to movement he’s not as accomplished.

Bling and Husk join the team for the last couple of chapters, but surely no-one will make it that far. The endless posing comes across as a theatre group improvising an action scenario, and the emotional impact of a villain exploiting children just drowns in glacial pace, turgid dialogue and barely credible motivations.