Uncanny X-Men #508

ex-women

Uncanny X-Men #508
Matt Fraction
Greg Land

The Fraction/Brubaker run on Marvel’s flagship X-title continues. Messiah Complex and Manifest Destiny have left the X-Men with a strange new status-quo, but strange has always been the status quo for them.

What worked: Fraction’s fast paced story telling is wonderful. Even in very talky moments, the story just clips along. He introduces each character with a quick intro caption that tell sthe name, the powers, and gives and adjective or two to describe them. No, I don’t know every character from the X-Men’s checkered history who shows up in the book, but thanks to these captions I know enough to get what is going on in the scene. Sure, I still have some questions, but I trust that anything I NEED to know will be told when the time comes for me to know it.
In the past, Greg Land’s artwork has looked a little too static, too posed. Simply, the drawings looked a little too much like the photos they were referencing. I don’t know what changed, but that quality is gone. Now all we have a lush, elegant, detailed renderings that look as vibrant as any comic on the stands today.

What did not work: Though there were some great reveals in this chapter of the story, it feels like it might be moving just a tad too slowly. Or, maybe it is just that I don’t quite know enough about what is going on to sink the hook in.
Also, there is a scene where a seemingly shocking revelation is made to s certain character, but the next time we see him, he has not reacted to it at all, and seems to be busy on an unrelated errand. Nothing terribly unrealistic, but it does take some of the weight from the conflict when even the characters it is affecting don’t really let it interrupt their schedules.