Virtual Adept

A few more mini-reviews of the books I’ve read recently:

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 - Hope - This trade covers Uncanny X-Men #410-415. The book starts off with a young boy mutant named Sammy who has a fish head, and the trauma he is experiencing in life due to the prejudice of his fellow class mates and kids in the neighborhood. Sammy is on the edge, he’s about to pull a Columbine or something, but Xavier happens to be flying by and senses Sammy’s plight, and stops to help. His mother was reluctant at first to place Sammy in Xavier’s care, but eventually she agrees and so Sammy gets into the X-jet. Meanwhile Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Archangel, Monet, Stacy X, and Iceman are answering a distress call in Scotland, but their plane crashes and then they get into a whole heap of trouble involving Juggernaut. There is a lot of ground covered in this trade. While at times it seemed a bit too soap-opera-ish, it was a good read and the writer Chuck Austen has given each of the characters a lot of depth. They aren’t just superheroes, they’re real people with real problems, dreams, and desires. It was a little confusing as a “first” X-men book (I’d read X-men stuff before and knew the major players but this was the first relatively recent book I’d read), because there are a bunch of characters coming in and out of the story. Overall, though, this is a book I could recommend to anyone. It certainly kept me hooked until the end, and I enjoyed reading it. The art for this book was very good — there were only a few scenes where I thought “that don’t look right,” but it wasn’t mind blowing, either. 7/10

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 2 - Dominant Species - This trade collects Uncanny X-Men #416-420. I really liked this book. Mainly, I liked it because I was familiar with most of the characters who were carried over from “Hope”, and their stories were really getting interesting, but I also really liked it because I loved Husk and her interaction with Archangel. The main baddies were pretty good also, and this book definitely had a “grim” side to it. With a bit more explicit artwork this book could easily have been Mature rated for violence, gore, and nudity. But even without that, this is a serious book with a grown-up story, and that made it a great read. This book has a lot of characters in it, too many to list, but I would say that Paige Guthrie aka Husk and Archangel are the two main characters of this arc. There are still a lot of side stories going on too, so it’s not a strictly linear book. Artwork was very good in this book also, I think I liked it better than Hope. Well worth picking this one up if you have any interest in the X-men at all. 9/10