Review by Frank Plowright

If there’s been a central presence in Ed Brubaker’s X-Men to date, it’s been Professor X, somewhat alone and isolated from the X-Men he’s been closest to over the years. Since the end of Messiah Complex, though, Brubaker has to turn his attentions elsewhere. Where he settles is on the core X-Men, an option unavailable to him to date, crossover excepted.

With Professor X dead (in the short term, anyway), Cyclops takes the decision to disband the X-Men and heads off on holiday to the Savage Land with Emma Frost. Nightcrawler and Wolverine accompany Colossus to Russia and the Angel flies to San Francisco, which in the long term proves of greatest relevance. Given the various locations, it should be no surprise that Brubaker packs a fair bit into five chapters. It’s his first time getting inside the heads of the major players, and he has some interesting observations about them and the world they inhabit. The result is by some distance his best X-Men.

Mike Choi has to draw some very different locations from page to page. His inclination is to attractiveness and glamour, so he succeeds in making San Francisco reverted back to an idealised version of the 1960s as alluring as intended, with the costuming a convincing addition. Employ the same style for a Russian torture chamber, though, and it’s too clean and unconvincing, as if the bullet holes have been applied by design. It’s also apparent that deadlines are taking their toll on Choi as for the final chapter Ben Oliver substitutes on the San Francisco scenes and isn’t anywhere near as refined.

This is a really fun collection showing that perhaps Brubaker has an affinity for superheroes after all, or perhaps that after a settling in period a good writer is always a good writer. This isn’t quite the end for Brubaker on X-Men as he’s there to help new writer Matt Fraction kick off with Manifest Destiny.