The entirety of this one-shot consists of Wolverine and Cyclops propositioning various X-characters to align with their respective sides in the newly fractured mutant community, followed by those characters announcing their decisions. That's it. Imagine if the brief recruitment scenes from Bendis's Avengers #1 were inflated to the size of a full-length comic and you'll have a pretty accurate sense as to what to expect here. Now, given that those scenes are being written by the criminally unheralded Kieron Gillen, there's plenty of smart dialogue and spot-on characterization to be had, but even a gifted writer can't escape what this comic is at its root. Regenesis is simply an illustrated X-Team checklist for the next several months' worth of Marvel books.

The dudes are by definition badass in Chaykin's noir-ish period, and the femmes are usually fatales. The first scary sequence is when Fury has to defend himself from a samurai streetwalker. She ends up impaled on a pointy parking sign. The second is when Dominic Fortune has to push his date and himself out of his airplane because it's getting strafed. They're both wearing nightgowns.