Broken Frontier

The beautiful Clayton Crain cover promises a scary, moody comic that the interior unfortunately fails to deliver. The X-Necrosha: The Gathering one-shot presents five short introductions to Selene's team currently rampaging through the X-Force/New Mutants/X-Men:Legacy subset of the X-Universe. Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost split the writing chores, and use Selene for the 1^st person narration as she assembles her forces. Each of the stories are illustrated by different artists, some excellent, some less so.

It's difficult to tell exactly the intended purpose of the one-shot, as the crossover is already in full force in the various titles. While it serves up some character details, nothing earth-shattering is really revealed, either about Selene or any of her henchmen. Having the stories separated by character made it all the more extraneous as there was no continuity of time or place to ground the narrative. The reader is unsure who was recruited first, etc... A story woven around the idea of recruitment would have been more interesting and made the one-shot a necessary piece of the story. As written, it is easy to cast aside.

At the very least, one would hope to get a good look into the character of Selene, through her thoughts and motivations, but she comes off very one-dimensional. For a centuries old pseudo-deity, her thoughts read more like a revenge seeking teenager seeking redress from the White Queen and others. As for her circle of death, none are terribly appealing, most having one form or other of a revenge motive. My favorite of the bunch was Senyaka, just for the shear simplicity of the deadly killing machine, assisted no doubt by Leonardo Manco's brilliant depiction of him.

There is a wide stylistic diversity in the stories, from the painterly Mateus Santoluco to the fairly standard superheroic renderings of Kalman Andrasofsky and Cam Smith. The aforementioned Manco, was probably matched best to his subject matter, while Santoluco's color palette seemed ill matched to the Roman Empire setting of the story.

I keep waiting for the X-book that will rekindle the interest I once had in the characters. The cover really drew me in for this book, and I was excited to read it. Unfortunately, the disjointed quality of this one-shot dashed that hope. The X-Necrosha crossover itself seems to be generating some interest, so maybe a collection of that story would prove more satisfying.