Bendis (w) and Bachalo, Townsend, Mendoza, Vey, Irwin, and Olazaba (a) and Bachalo (c)
The new X-Men team Cyclops has assembled isn't exactly up to spec yet and Cyclops wants to make sure they're ready when the true tests come. That means extra training for everyone, both using and not using powers. Perhaps the most disillusioned is Benjamin Deeds, the new X-Man who can change his appearance (or at least people's perceptions of him) to match what others want to see. He believes he is not of much use to the X-Men and Cyclops doesn't really help that feeling. Emma Frost, though, sees his power as perhaps the most impressive of the bunch and takes it upon herself to train him a little more, bringing him to Atlantic City and running him through a couple of tests to get him used to using his powers. After he's worked a bit with it, she sends him on a mission, delivering a letter to one Timothy Dugan (who readers will recognize as Dum Dum Dugan) in a disguised SHIELD facility. Deeds manages to make his way through successfully, deliver the message, and leave. The message, unfortunately for Deeds, informs Dugan that SHIELD is using Sentinels and that they need to discontinue or it will spark a war and is signed by Cyclops. Men surround Deeds as he's trying to leave, though Illyana and Emma break him out in time. They return to base and find an impressed but not surprised Cyclops waiting.
I think this would be the right move for this book for the next set of issues, a series of what basically amount to one-shots focused on each new character individually. I think the team moments of this book have been bogged down by Bendis' need to back-and-forth every bit of dialogue and to make everyone quip in the background of tense moments and what have you. Changing the focus from team to individuals to help establish who these characters are would go a long way to legitimizing the X-Men team as a whole. We've had this team for 14 issues now and I feel like I have very little sense of who these guys are as individuals and even by their powers. The best way to right that ship would be to allow each of them some one-on-one time with a professor or something, giving them their own story to establish them, as this issue did. As a result, I liked this issue more than I've liked a lot of the others. I think giving us a sense of character would help a lot in terms of making the book feel more like an X-Men book and would, perhaps, make some of the back-and-forth banter parts more tolerable (less optimistic on that front).
X-Men 7
Wood (w) and T. Dodson and R. Dodson (a) and Keith (c)
Lady Deathstrike is returning to the Marvel Universe in the form of a shared body after dying some time ago. The body she's sharing is that of 18-year-old Ana Cortes, billionaire heiress to her recently deceased father's Colombian empire. Cortes wanted to team with Lady Deathstrike and upgraded herself to accept her consciousness and powers (kind of ill-defined on the how she did that, as yet, or REALLY the why). Her target now is Karima Shapandar, newly out of her coma, hoping that she can get her hands on the Omega Level Sentinel tech inside of her. Armed with a set of henchmen and dossiers on the everyone at the school, Cortes arrives at Westchester, hoping to access Karima. It's easier than she thought to reach Karima as Karima and new school resident Monet, formerly of X-Factor and currently taking some time and laying low, are out for a run. Cortes' men manage to get a shot on Karima, hitting her in the arm, before Monet, not documented on Cortes' intel, absolutely destroys the henchmen and their weapons. Cortes leaves but not before Monet identifies her as Lady Deathstrike. As both teams regroup, the X-Men realize what they're up against and Deathstrike finds a new target and a new assistant; her new target, based on recent gathered information, is the immensely powerful Arkea, and her new assistant is Daredevil villain Typhoid Mary.
A lot of cool stuff here as our cast of characters grows a little bit with the addition of Karima, Monet, and (kind of) Bling. Bling has a moment in here where we find out she's been talking to Jubilee about her love-life and things aren't going particularly well, as her unrequited feelings for Mercury led to Mercury punching her, apparently. She tells Jubilee that it's okay though, as she has her eyes set on someone else now (HINT: smart money's on Jubilee), meaning we're not likely to see the last of her just yet. ANYWAY, the story I spent the whole paragraph above describing. The re-emergence of Lady Deathstrike is an interesting choice and one that I think I'll be a little more interested by when we get a little more information. I had to re-read most of the comic before reviewing it and still ended up deleting a lot of my first attempts at sentences, as they mostly kept saying things like "Cortes wanted to team with Lady Deathstrike because...oh, we don't really know that. Cortes upgraded herself by...I don't know. I mean, the slot in her neck, right? And like, a USB drive? Um. Okay." Still, the characterization is solid with a nice amount of time spent on new resident Monet and on Karima, as well as brief flashes of Storm and Rachel's continued power struggle and Jubilee's situation. There's a story forming here and it seems like it could be a good one, but I'd like to get a little more information out of it first.
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