After a pretty decent opening arc, I was really excited about the return of Nightcrawler and I was looking forward to the next adventure the Amazing X-Men would be going out. To then find out Aaron was leaving the book, I was really disappointed, but then I saw who was taking over and I felt a slight glimmer of hope!! Unfortunately, I am not too impressed with Kyle and Yost’s first issue.
This first issue seemed to suffer with a lot of problems; it was just categorically uninteresting. The characterisation was very bland and along with the jumpiness of the story it just felt really slow to read and boring.
The issue begins with 2 guys in a factory fighting. One killed the other, and then we see nothing of either of them again in the issue. I am assuming because they are in Canada, and Wolverine travels to Canada later in the issue that there will be some return to these 2 figures. Next in the issue we get the return of Alpha Flight who is depressed as she is having issues with James, who has left on some mission. One of the things I hated about this book was the treatment of Nightcrawler and Colossus, his big return, we had 6 issues of great adventure for Nightcrawler to return, and Colossus, he just appears and him and Kurt give eachother a big hug! I really don’t understand the brushing over of colossus’ return! The rest of the book is Ororo trying to find out where Logan is as she is worried about him as he doesn’t have his healing powers, and oh wait, he has gone to Canada, which is a place his life is always threatened. Wolverine tracks down James through his smelling and sniffing, only to call for backup as he sees a big scary Wendigo. No wait, make that a lot of them!!
I really felt let down by this narrative. It was so simple to follow, there were no complications, and it was just a really straightforward, uneventful introduction to a story which from the solicits made it sound like pure fun and excitement. Which in the end it had none of that.
I really had high hopes for this issue and listed it as one of my picks of the week in The Comic Wish List (be sure to check it out every Tuesday by Oscar Russell and myself), what was not to like, we were told there will be the beginning of a Wendigo War, what we got was a bunch of mutants looking for Wolverine in another Wolverine centric issue. This issue really didn’t live up to the promise it had.
