X-Men Schism #5 – Review

By: Jason Aaron (writer), Adam Kubert (penciler), Mark Roslan (inks), Jason Keith (colors), Jared K. Fletcher (letters), Jordan D. White (assistant editor), Daniel Ketchum (associate editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: The final issue where we see how the X-Men split up and why.

What’s Good: It’s always nice to jiggle the status quo.  The X-Men have spent the last ~3 years living in San Francisco with a big “Welcome” sign hanging outside for any mutant who wanted to join them.  That was fun and enjoyable, but now we’re going to get something new and that’s a good thing.  As long as the status quo is constantly shifting under the character’s feet, the writers and artists always have new things that can help to inspire them.  There are all kinds of cool possibilities from the X-Men splitting into two groups.  In some ways, it can be a small microcosm of the superhero Civil War and in others, it’ll just be fun to see how the two groups respond differently to external events.  Like, what happens now if a mutant baby is born: Do both sides send a team?  Do they consult each other first?  Do they fight?  Movement forward in the story is almost always a positive.

The other neat thing in this issue was that the young mutants made good and helped to take down the super-Sentinel.  Even though the story of the teenage hero taking down a Big Bad who seemed to tough for them is not new, it’s always one of those things that make me smile.  Always…