The idea that the virus erased all references to the X-Men so there's no way to prove they're Americans makes no sense. Angel's and Beast's identities are PUBLICLY KNOWN. If the virus erased all references to them, then how did they manage to exist in society? Warren even ran a MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION after X-Men 158. How could he do that if all records relating to him kept getting erased by the virus?

That was some cool lock picking from Gambit but it doesn't top Ororo's to escape from Nanny from way back.

Bizarrely enough, in my country, this issue was published as the final part of X-Tinction Agenda. The last page was edited to show that Cyclops defeats Hodge with that one optic blast...

I've always found the scene where Psylocke has her "breakdown" and seemingly agrees to the mutate process very touching. I've wondered what would've happened if it wasn't a feint... For a time after reading that issue, I kept coming up with ideas for stories involving a mutate Psylocke ;)

Is anyone else a fan of Chief Magistrate Anderson?

Jim Lee is far better an artist than Rob Liefeld or Jon Bogdavone ever were, but even he is IMO a rather poor choice for a mainstream superhero book. His storytelling is incredibly poor, and far too much of what he draws looks like pin-ups on steroids.

Guan Yap's art in the next part of this crossover is far more functional, and probably the highlight of it far as actual storytelling goes - faint praise as that is.

I honestly don't understand what beyond completism could possibly draw someone to buy these issues.

"I honestly don't understand what beyond completism could possibly draw someone to buy these issues."

Well, I love crossovers. So, if there's a crossover in any of the titles I bought, even if parts of it were in other titles that I didn't buy, I would still get it.

"Jim Lee is far better an artist than Rob Liefeld or Jon Bogdavone ever were, but even he is IMO a rather poor choice for a mainstream superhero book. His storytelling is incredibly poor, and far too much of what he draws looks like pin-ups on steroids."

Could I ask for some examples of what you consider Lee's poor storytelling? Not trying to argue, I'm just not certain I see it?

Hodge may think the X-Men have lost their powers, but his murder of Wipeout, the one guy whose power is a real threat to Hodge's enemies, is just an incredibly stupid bit of plotting. I could have bought it if some time had been taken to set up the idea that with the mutants captured and depowered, Wipeout isn't needed any more, and his death will prevent the mutants from ever getting their powers back. But as it is, Hodge just gratuitously destroys his own greatest weapon.

Of course, the very fact the Genoshans are allied with Hodge is gratuitous: why invite a psychotic cyborg-monster to hang out in your national headquarters, when your military itself is sufficient (in Uncanny 270) to take down your enemies? Again we're missing plot setup that could have made things much more plausible.

@Piotr: While I generally think Jim Lee is a good storyteller, with his "flaw" being his tendency for overly-stylized and "exploitative" art, one particularly eggereous example of bad storytelling is in the highlighted Psylocke panel Fnord scanned. She's suppose to a horrified at the abuse Cable is taking, and yet she is so busy giving sexy pouty-lipped poses to the guards you'd never know it if it wasn't for the dialogue. (and and if Betsy arched her back any further, she'd snap in half. Her REAL mutant power is the ability not to have any internal organs in her abdomen.)

@Walter
Yeah that's one of the things I've been wondering about this whole crossover is why Hodge has been included. He has no previous connection to Genosha so for them to be suddenly linked up seems like a rather strained convenience. While both Hodge and the Genoshans are clearly human supremicist who abuse mutants, they btoh do so in different context. The Genoshans don't hate mutants as much as they want to exploit them and keep them oppressed. Hodge has more personalized reasons for his dislike of mutants. I wonder if this was simply to have enemies that had more of a personal connect with all the teams (since the New Mutants or X-Factor never had any dealing with Genosha before, but both teams have a history with Hodge.)

@Piotr: I suppose to a significant extent the fact that Jim Lee's pencils are so tiring work against my opinion of his storytelling. A Sal Buscema or even a Pat Broderick would have more of a sense of flow and less obsession with painted skin textures. Also, I now realize, the coloring is really hurting the storytelling of this issue. Still...

Jim Lee's characters seem to spend half the time seeking the best possible pose for showing their fitness and looking sexy despite excessively hatched skins and fabric. Also, I just noticed, the panels end up needing quite a lot of text to tell us what is happening, because the images are actually rather static, unconnected, even unfocused. There are so many acts of ludicrous sustained violence, and it comes oddly muted because the panels rarely if ever truly _follow_ from each other. They are just pin-ups thrown together, often from awkward angles that further obscure what is actually happening. There are no gradual changes of perspective, no visual clues helping us locate ourselves in relation to previous panels. Even the panel backgrounds tend to be abstract, unrecognizable, and/or overhatched. At points the actual intent seems to be to make it vague what is happening on the panel, with all those odd lines and perspectives.

See for instance the three-panel scan midway through this entry, coming right after the Archangel/Wolverine fight. Psylocke is fighting three characters that are just a hair away from looking more like robots than actual people in uniforms. Her manacles are colored in a tone far too similar to that of the uniforms and may well end up unnoticed. Her leg is inhumanly long. The posture, oddly stactic, perhaps explaining why the background is vaguely speed-line like and so abstract. We have no clue from the panel about where the action is happening. Is it open space? Are they floating in the air? Closed in a cell? We can't tell from the panel itself. There is literally no hint of either a wall, ceiling or even floor, nor of their absence. The panel following is even more obscuring, to the point that one has to spend considerable effort to even realize that this is in fact Psylocke again, being shown from a very inconvenient angle, against an even worse background, doing an action that is neither clear (I just now noticed that she is actually parrying a gunshot of some kind; I had previously read it as her firing some kind of weapon) nor much of a logical sequence of the previous panel. It would almost work better as change of scene to some other character. And then in the third panel the perspective is again changed all of a sudden, while the coloring, oddly enough, seems to want us to doubt that these are the same characters from the panel above. There is no clear reason and less benefit for the panel to be so heavily yellow.

Thanks for answer, guys! If you don't mind... :)

@Jon: I can agree that Lee isn't that best with emotions... That said, Psylocke is emoting correctly in two of the three panels of the sequence you mention. It's the middle panel where she is strangely stoic (I've never read it as her pouting... more like here giving an proud stare. Still, it doesn't make sense in the context, I agree). Also, I must say that I love that shot of her when she's at Havok's feet (really, we need some Betsy-as-a-mutate fanfic. It'd be so touching...:)).

@Luis: if you don't mind, I must say that I don't agree with you about these three panels you mentioned. The thing is, they have no backgrounds... but the panel before them (which Fnord hasn't included) clearly shows Betsy being escorted down a corridor. I really think that it's rather clear where these panels take place. Also, I've never had trouble understanding what's going on in there: Betsy kicks and disables two guards, then shields herself with her manacles, frees her hands and knocks the third guard down. Yes, this sequence could've been done better (for once, there's no transition between Betsy walking placidly and Betsy kicking butt), but it's not that bad. Also, I'd say that, for me, these panels are *very* dynamic!

BTW. I love that panel where Betsy shoots the machine gun at Hodge from the ventilation tunnel. That shot of her is just beautifully detailed...

BTW 2 (unrelated to Lee's art): You know what's weird about this whole story? That every single government institution in Genosha seems to be located in the Citadel. The court, the President's office, the Genengineer's office, the Genengineer's laboratory, the Magistrate HQ, Hodge's lair (isn't that convenient that this government building can accomodate Hodge with a private prisoner pen and a fighting arena?)... That's just lazy writing, IMHO - and it makes Genosha look less like a nation and more like supervillain organisation.

Different tastes and all that, I suppose.

I can take Arthur Adams in small, infrequent doses, but his style becomes rather unconfortable after a while.

Jim Lee, who shows a lot of influence from Adams, gives me the same challenge with less skill. I can see that he means to show dynamism, but it all just falls flat to me. I almost feel like pricking the characters to see if they are pumped ballons or something. He could be a great penciler if he had the right discipline and mentoring, I suppose. But I fear that to me his pencils will always look, for lack of a better word, mishappen. Looking at his work consistently reminds me of how frustratingly close to being _good_ he is.

Although, in truth, I fear this storyline may have more trouble in the plot than in the art.

Luis, good points about the lack of flow. I'd been trying to figure out how to answer Piotr's question and that's the phrase I was looking for.

Lee's art is stylized, which isn't a bad thing, but in his case it leads to every one looking posed for a pin-up which often detracts from panel-to-panel continuity in both storytelling and characterization. Most of the panels shown here have backgrounds, for instance, but they're also crammed full with detail that there's no room to breathe.

And most of the detail doesn't tell us much either. Hodge is just a mess of wires and a head, the Genoshans are barely recognizable as human beings. Gambit pulls a weird-looking stick out of his leg and uses it to pick some green flower-thing. The walls of the arena are the same generic metal panels as the walls of the prison and wherever they do the fight scene. Smoke and wires and blast rays and Kirby Krackle fill almost every panel without adding anything, and there's so much of it.

Luis, I actually agree with your opinion that Lee is frustratingly close to being good. I admit that I've been a big fan of his in my teenage years - but then, I became aware of the flaws in his art and became an anti-fan :) These days, I look at his art (especially his art here, in his UXM period) and I can tell that it *is* appealing to me to a serious extent... but then, I notice the sexed-up poses on women and I can't help rolling my eyes. The man clearly has a serious talent, I really wish he developed his style in a more realistic direction. He really could've been amazing, then...

One reason I really prefer Silvestri's art. He has much of the stylization that Jim Lee has, but his characters are more cartoony when they need to be, better acting ("acting" in the sense that you believe lines-on-paper are real people and treat them as such) and the panel-to-panel flow is better.

I always like to cite that early "Fall of the Mutants" scene where Illyana shows up to take Peter to the big fight, and she's just an over-excited babbling teenage girl finding out that her big brother is recovered. If Jim Lee had drawn that sequence, it would have mostly been about Illyana posing, and instead of Peter believably laughing to himself as he waits for the chance to speak, he'd have been stoic and... posing. Considering the whole point was to give them a last moment together before Peter dies, it works much better with the happy way she throws her arms around him. The characters took precedence, not the art [which admittedly is what makes them exist.]

Before we move on to the space arc, wasnt there a Starjammers book sometime in 1990? I remember unsold copies, with its hefty price tag, sitting in the spinner rack for months.

Yes, and fnord will get to it soon:
http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3&start=30

We are not that far from the time when the Shiar/P!ndyr plot that began in #265 gets revisited.

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/uncanny_men_265-266.shtml

I assume the two stories were somewhat coordinated.

No, the stories weren't coordinated at all. The Spotlight on the Starjammers was originally intended as a Marvel Comics Presents story and had no coordination with the main books, which causes some issues with chronology, as we'll see when fnord reviews it.

"Issues with chronology" are the least of my worries. The only thing I remember from that series is "Bald Phoenix" and that's bad enough. *shudder*

I remember that Cockrum did a similar effect in GS#1, but that panel of Scott slowly regaining his powers is fantastic.

It's interesting to look at events of "The X-Tinction Agenda" from the perspective of 2016.

When we first were introduced to Genosha, it was more or less played straight as a police state that enslaved & exploited mutants for the benefit of the white human majority, sort of a fictionalized version of South Africa, or if you prefer the United States before the Civil Rights Movement. It's horrible, but it's realistically plausible, an example of the banality of evil.

But when we return to Genosha is now being run by Cameron Hodge, an absolutely over-the-top, insane, demonically-cursed, cyborg, manipulative mutant-hating bigot with weird hair who has taken advantage of the country's institutionalized bigotry and totalitarian structure to completely seize power, resulting in many of the former rulers being so aghast at what has happened that they find themselves having to work with their old enemies the X-Men to try to overthrow this lunatic tyrant.

Not to get too political, but doesn't that all sound very familiar?