Uncanny X-Men #5 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen, (writer); Greg Land (penciler); Jay Leisten (inker); Justin Ponsor, Laura Martin and Guru eFX (colors)

The Story: The Montana State Tourism Board gets a new attraction to boast about.

The Review: Oddly, in the wake of the Schism, Uncanny X-Men has become what you might call the traditional X-Men Book, while Wolverine and the X-Men has been the one breaking new ground. I expected the reverse, because while Cyclops is trying to preserve the remains of mutantkind from an island of San Francisco, Wolverine is re-opening the very school where the X-Men began. But author Jason Aaron has made Logan’s book completely fresh by putting the emphasis on the running of an actual school; under Xavier, the school always was more of a headquarters than a learning center. Meanwhile, Kieron Gillen has used Uncanny to tell science-fiction stories about a group of super-powered individuals fighting monsters and supervillains in a world that fears and hates them, all in the hopes that their benevolence will garner goodwill. You know, the standard X-Men storyline. So when Uncanny X-Men is successful, the success is derived not from innovation, but rather from the excellence of the execution. Sadly, the execution of Uncanny X-Men #5 is uneven, and as such just doesn’t get as interesting as it should.

This series opens with our heroes preparing to investigate a town in Montana that has mysteriously turned into a completely alien landscape. Readers of Uncanny X-Force will remember this as Tabula Rasa, a small town Montana Archangel destroyed and then accelerated in time so that a hundred million years worth of evolution could pass within it in a matter of minutes. And here I have to applaud Gillen’s ability to smoothly integrate continuity. Sure, this helps tidy up some dangling plot threads from another title, but it’s a completely natural fit for his work. He manages to use another author’s ideas in a way that actually enriches them while still providing a solid, self-contained story.