Review by Karl Verhoven
You may want to read the second Hellfire Gala collection before starting here, as that’s where a new X-Men team is selected. Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened in the X-Men’s own title, rather than the team randomly changing from one volume to the next? It means there’s little connection between Vol. 2 and here, which opens in the middle of a set-to between a branch of the Eternals and the mutants of Krakoa on the basis of their also having the technology to resurrect their dead. As presented here, the motivation seems unjustifiably trivial, but Gerry Duggan is working with Kieron Gillen’s idea, and it may make more sense in A.X.E.: Judgement Day.
Otherwise both opening stories concern what’s going on in Judgement Day, but can be read and enjoyed independently, as the bigger picture’s all but irrelevant. The second begins with a journalist presenting her interview with Iceman to an editor after Iceman has saved the world and being told to drop the mention of him being gay. It’s well-written on Duggan’s part as it’s uncertain if the editor is bigoted, knows his readership, or just figures it’s not relevant to the story, and over the next dozen pages we discover what Iceman did and why the mention is important.
Both Judgement Day tie-ins are drawn by C.F. Villa, who slaps a big image on every page, which may look superficially dynamic, but creates messy pages and sloppy storytelling. The art of Joshua Cassara on most of the remainder (sample page) displays a far better sense of the cinematic, and he’s more likely to place the X-Men in fully realised locations than posed on very basic or colour backgrounds.
Cassara’s contribution is on the high concept visit to the Vault. As seen in Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men, there’s an isolated area where time moves at an accelerated rate, and those within are millennia ahead of humanity’s development. Unfortunately, were they able to escape, their intentions would be to conquer, and they’d provide an existential threat to life itself. Their escape was previously halted, but at the cost of leaving one mutant behind. Forge has decided it’s time to rescue Darwin. “Do you ever have a day when you feel dumb?” Forge is asked. It’s a rhetorical question. Despite Forge’s genius, though, Duggan has inflated the threat so well in the opening chapter that suspense accompanies him all the way through his mission. While Duggan messes with perceptions of reality. It’s the heart of this collection, the more cerebral end of X-Men stories, but thrilling and unpredictable.
It’s going through the motions basic business for the final chapter, as Duggan never really sells the main point well enough. However, it drops a killer lead in to Vol. 4, and the remainder has been a great ride.
