An ok story of Colossus confronting his past while dealing the loss of Kitty Pryde. Introduces the Beast collecting eccentric scientists for his X Club, to figure out how to have more mutants. This adds, of course, yet more characters, but they're adequately distinguishable, and interesting enough. ( )

Matt Fraction has some fun in the four-issue Lovelorn story, as the Beast and Angel round up super-scientists to work on the "No more mutants" problem, Colossus works on his depression in light of Shadowcat being shot into space in Astonishing X-Men, and mutants find themselves further hated when it is revealed that a mutant birth was the proximate cause of a town's destruction. Terry Dodson has art duties on this run; not my favorite style, especially his take on Emma Frost, but not bad per se. Just no my cuppa. The Annual is a bit of filling in history with Emma Frost, Sebastian Shaw, and Namor, written by Fraction and with art by Mitch Breitweiser (present sequences) and Daniel Acuña (past sequences). The story didn't do anything for me; I suppose it is a setup for Dark Reign but it lacked the wealth of crazy ideas that I expect from Fraction. ( )

I've seen a lot of varying reviews on this particular volume. Some love it, some hate it, many are 'Meh' over it. The reason is, there isn't much in this volume that can stand up as a stand alone volume. This is a 'middle-of-the-story' volume, but you can't get from the beginning to the end of a story without something, in the middle right? There is lots going on in the X-Men universe by this time, and in Matt Fraction's stories, this is one of the main tie ins to what's to come. We see more of Madeleine Pryor as the Red Queen; Beast is recruiting his own version of the X-Club to try to figure out the secret to unlocking the X-gene; Colossus is off rescuing kidnaps Russians; and footage of the massacre in Alaska is leaked. But that's all there is in this volume, glimpses of the events leading up to things yet to come and the beginnings of lots and lots of secrets.

The inclusion of Annual #2 is a tie in to the Dark Reign story line moving throughout the rest of the Marvel Universe at this time. It seems to be a bit revisionist (but what isn't, these days?) and it seems a little out of place in the grand scheme of this story, but it does solve one mystery from the early issues in the volume: what was going on with Sebastian Shaw? ( )

1090 ( )