Broken Frontier

This issue of Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men is Hogwarts meets the Magic School Bus.

Never has an X-Men title been more fun. It has developed a wonderful Hogwarts feel since the first issue, and now Jason Aaron injects a little bit of the Magic School Bus. Nick Bradshaw’s pencils are a great reason for why there is so much bustling energy on the pages. The school always feels alive with extra jokes going on in the background of any given panel, and while some of his characters look obscure - Idie and Wolverine, mainly - his overall presentation is a knockout.

Kitty Pryde has unexpectedly become pregnant, and after two days she looks fit to burst. It’s a strange turn of events to be sure, and what is actually wrong with her turns out to be even stranger and somewhat disturbing, but it allows the X-Men to take a crazy, tiny journey into her bloodstream to fight the problem. The cast is as numerous as could be expected with any X-title, yet Wolverine, Kitty, Beast, Broo, Quentin, Kid Gladiator, Angel, and Genesis all get the perfect amount of page time to both develop their characters and push the story forward.

After so many stories involving politics, genocide, and purple robots, it is a blessing to finally get a story based on the students as much as the teachers, who together are solving problems unique to mutants.