The Astonishing X-Men # 38 is far from astonishing; in fact,
I would change the name of this book all together to the Slapstick Men or the Mediocre
X-Men because this book is far from an X-Men book. The new story arc called “Meanwhile” is
written by Christos Gage and the art is by Juan Bobillo, with inks by Marcelo
Sosa and color by Chris Sotomayor.
The story is another tale with the Brood, but with a weird and
uninspired Alien idea. The story begins
with Abigail Brand and her crew defending themselves from a Brood outbreak
that occurs in their research facility up in space. The defense is hopeless and
Brand ends up giving the order to his remaining crew to get out and leave
before she gets caught by one of the Brood and is infected. Beast shows up to his former team and pleads
for their help in the situation instead of asking the Secret Avengers because of
the team’s former experience with the Brood.
After a couple pages of bad dialogue and a resolution of
problems between Kitty and Lockheed, the team goes to the station to rescue
Brand from the Brood. Beast finds her,
but she refuses to leave without the equipment.
The reason for this is that SWORD has been researching the Brood a'la
Alien to see what they are and how they can benefit humans. What SWORD is
doing, is purposely infecting people with the Brood then separating the host
from the human to make more test’s. The Brood
escaped their pens and fighting ensues, but instead of killing everyone they
infected them and are kept alive to reinfect them and use the same equipment to mass reproduce more
Xenomorphs. The team successfully
retrieves the equipment and is ready to leave, but Brand turns on the X-Men
because the larva has taken over and now she won’t let them leave.
The story of Astonishing X-Men #38 is very boring and full of explanation. It came across as a goofy version of Alien the movie rather an X-Men story from the way the
laid out all the action and dialog.
The character interaction was equally bad as well. Most of the dialogue from the characters felt
goofy and very out of tone. A majority of the bad dialogue came from Kitty, I know she is “the young adult” in the
story but wow; she sounded like she was
a 13 year old more than her actual age. The
interaction between her and Lockheed was so corny that I almost had to rechecked the
cover of the book to see if I made a mistake and picked up something else.
The
art of the book was bad as well. This is a shame because all of these characters, when drawn correctly look awesome. It looked corny just like the story and very unlike X-Men. It didn’t have a gritty feel that the X-men
should have. The art on Colossus look terrible; on most of the panels he looked
like Mr. Sandman from Punch-Out!. Kitty looked like an older Angelina Jolie and
since when did the Beast begin to look Aslan. The only good art on the book
was Lockheed and the gorgeous cover art by Salvador Larroca and
Frank D’Armata.
I would say that by reading the first part of this story arc
I would have to pass on reading more of the “Astonishing” X-Men.
Overall Score - 1.0/10