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by **Punchy** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:07 pm

I hope the feminist comics fan community doesn’t hate me for this, but I thought this issue was kind of bad. The novelty of having an all-female team of X-Men has worn off, and what’s left is a pretty uninspired, standard superhero story that ends in clichéd fashion. It’s not enough to have diversity (although this book isn’t actually that diverse, it goes too far the other way) when the story is no good.

In the first issue, Wood reintroduced Sublime and introduced his sister, Arkea, and set up what could be a really exciting, powerful villain, and here, she’s defeated way too easily and the X-Men save the day. Now of course, Arkea probably isn’t actually defeated, and she’ll be back sooner rather than later, but still, it was anticlimactic.

The best scenes in this issue were the smaller, character stuff, like Jubilee interacting with her ‘son’ Shogo. The reason this book should work is not because the cast are women, but because they are great characters with long, rich histories, and stuff like that is where the real quality comes. I also much preferred the scenes at the Jean Grey School, where Kitty really got to shine, and show why she’s the Headmistress, and also seeing more minor, student characters like Bling and Pixie get some more spotlight. It’s a shallow thing, I know, but I particularly liked Pixie’s hat.

I don’t want to bash this book, because I like Wood and the concept of an all-female team is good, but without Olivier Coipel I think I would have really hated this issue, I just love his art, it’s just so clean and exciting, perfect for widescreen superheroics. It’s a shame he’s already off the book, but the replacements lined up in David Lopez and the Dodsons are great too. I hope the ‘Battle For The Atom’ crossovers help improve this title, and perhaps give it a little more focus. It feels to me like this book is coasting along on a wave of ‘yay, women characters!’ without really doing anything special to merit praise, I know Wood can do better, and I hope he can.

by **e_galston** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:15 pm

I believe Kitty is no longer co-headmistress... she stepped down when she took on training the Original X-Men. I believe Storm is the co-headmistress now...

by **chap22** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:25 pm

the first issue was complete garbage, I am not surprised to hear that #2 and this one probably were too.

by **Punchy** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:30 pm

e_galston wrote:I believe Kitty is no longer co-headmistress... she stepped down when she took on training the Original X-Men. I believe Storm is the co-headmistress now...

Oh yeah, I forgot.

But still, Kitty's awesome.

by **e_galston** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 3:26 pm

i liked Pixie's hat too

by **guitarsmashley** » Sat Aug 03, 2013 7:45 pm

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that thinks this book is total garbage. If it weren't for the art this would be a complete waste of time. Nothing like the climax of a fight being a single black panel. I'm really excited for Battle of the Atom with the exception of what ever parts of it Wood is writing. I haven't read very much of Wood's to understand the respect he gets. Demo was good. Local was great, DMZ got boring and everything else just runs together. This book is just bad.

by **TimDrake'sDumbWings** » Sun Aug 04, 2013 12:31 am

I thought the first two issues were solid, but this was trash. So Arkea is defeated because she says she's defeated? And--after all their obnoxious hand-wringing that amounted to nothing--the X-Men never have to make the choice regarding "killing" Karima? Storm referring to "this team that's not a team" when the characters in this arc were simply the ones who were around to deal with the issue soured me on this to the point where I think I'm pretty much done with this book.

by **guitarsmashley** » Sun Aug 04, 2013 12:54 am

TimDrake'sDumbWings wrote:I thought the first two issues were solid, but this was trash. So Arkea is defeated because she says she's defeated? And--after all their obnoxious hand-wringing that amounted to nothing--the X-Men never have to make the choice regarding "killing" Karima? Storm referring to "this team that's not a team" when the characters in this arc were simply the ones who were around to deal with the issue soured me on this to the point where I think I'm pretty much done with this book.

Yeah, I'll read the tie in issues and thats it.