New Mutants #14 – Review

by Zeb Wells (writer), Ibrahim Roberson, Lan Medina, and Nathan Fox (artists)

The Story: Professor X recruits his crackpot son, Legion, to aid the X-Men against the unrelenting Nimrod attack on San Francisco.  Can we say ‘desperate measures’?  Cyclops rallies the troops on Utopia while Hope mans up big time and the mutants start suffering injuries and some red shirt casualties (again).  Meanwhile, in the future, X-Force continues their suicide mission and ends up face to face with, not one, but two huge Master Mold sentinels.  You want hopeless, we’ve got hopeless.

What’s Good: I’ve commented before about how difficult it is to review every chapter of this crossover when they’re all so (for the most part) damn good.  So, let’s just cut the crap and do this checklist style, shall we?

Breakneck pacing and dire straits?  Check.

Hardcore action scenes where one or more X-Men get their ass kicked?  Check.

Spot-on characterization for all your X-Favorites? Check.

Cyclops gives a rallying speech that you’ve heard a million times already but still find yourself getting amped up by?  Check.

One or two twists or turns in the plot?  Check.

A kick-ass cliffhanger that makes you say to yourself, “Hell yeah,”?  Checkity-check.

See, that saved us some time, didn’t it?  Oh, and I enjoyed the artistic decision to use such an offbeat artist as Nathan Fox to portray the Legion-mindscape scenes.  It was a welcome visual trick to the storytelling.