Broken Frontier

X-Men Legacy #237 brings an end to the immediate conflicts facing the X-Men.  With Magneto and Hope entering the fight, the Sentinels have a harder time killing mutants than they did before.  Cable’s X-Force team succeeds in disrupting the Nimrod Sentinel supply and shorting out the Sentinels in the present.  Still, the team isn’t out of the woods yet—a threat appears from the sidelines and threatens to still bring destruction on the X-Men.

Mike Carey’s writing steps "Second Coming" up a notch this week.  The speech he gives his characters bring them a good deal of life and personality.  Carey is responsible for one of my favorite scenes in this entire story arc, which is the scene in this issue where Cypher is getting assimilated by the Mastermold.  It was just the right mix of post-apocalyptic, computers-rule-all, Matrix references crammed into a very strong scene.  I especially liked all of the effort X-Force puts into physically trying to dismantle the Sentinels before this happens.  It makes it so the victory doesn’t seem like it’s too easy.

At the same time, the fight scenes seemed to lack a lot of depth.  Relative to "Messiah Complex," "Nation X," and the other major X-Men story arcs, "Second Coming" is very action oriented.  So far in the series, with the exception of the opening issues, each chapter seems to subscribe to the same formula:  The problem is introduced or reintroduced in the beginning, then action throughout the middle and then a change at the end.  It’s a fine formula, but when reading the books, it just seems like the same fight scene played out from different angles month after month.  Every once in a while, someone will do something interesting, but usually, it’s just flying, punching, and energy bolts.  These issues would’ve been more rewarding if there was a bit more thought put into the actual fights.

Greg Land’s art is on par with his usual standards.  All of the images are well drawn and nice to look at, but they seem a bit too posed.  There’s a panel on the third page, where Wolverine and Domino are standing side by side during their battle with the Mastermold.  Domino is reacting to Archangel taking a hit, but she’s just pointing and holding her gun above her head.  It just didn’t seem like the natural reaction to that event.  Also, the background in this panel cuts out so it just seems like two character sketches pasted next to each other. 

Land’s storytelling pacing is great, though, and his images seem to pop off the page, which is really important in a book like this, but the compositions in each panel aren’t fantastic.  For example, there’s a double page spread about halfway through the book where the X-Men are fighting the Sentinels.  The page is laid out so that all of the action is moving from left to right or right to left.  It makes the image feel a little one-dimensional, giving it a teaser poster feel, rather than a sequential art feel.