Boy, was this book a disappointment.

I've never read Zdarsky before but I've heard good things about his Spiderman books, so I had fairly high expectations for this miniseries. What I ended up with was a book where the X-Men act like idiots. For what is essentially a diplomatic mission to the Fantastic Four, Prof X decides to send Wolverine, Magneto and Pyro. Considering that the FF are already trepidatious when it comes to the X-Men, this seems like a mission roster designed to provoke them and it predictably leads to the X-Men and FF mixing it up. This was a common trope of Bendis' during his long decline, advance the plot of the story by having your heroes behave in a completely stupid or irrational manner. Think Carol Danvers in 'Civil War II'. I sincerely hope that this is Zdarsky phoning it in and that he's not simply a lousy writer.

Regarding the art, I had extremely low expectations for Terry Dobson and yet he still managed to surprise me. In addition to his normally terrible art, apparently Dobson thought it would be funny to dress a few of the X-Men ridiculously. Most notably, he put Magneto in his infamous purple with a giant 'M' costume from Uncanny #200. Near the end he puts Cyclops in a similarly silly costume.

This book is unworthy of Hickman's 'Dawn of X'. more

Yes please.

This book is garbage. Rosenberg was once a promising writer but his Uncanny run has been a disaster. What was the point of making humans forget about mutants only to reverse that in the very next issue? How does blowing up the cerebro helmet accomplish this? Why were so many characters meaninglessly killed off? What is Jordon White even doing? He's clearly not 'editing' anything.

Larroca's looks great but the the second artist looks terrible.

Help me Jonathan Hickman, you're my only hope. more

I've really liked Rosenburg's run so far but this issue was pointless. It's like a filler issue but with a completely meaningless death.

It makes no sense that Rahne wouldn't defend herself. It's also inconceivable that a group of gendarmes would get the drop on Wolverine and Kwannon.

The X-Men Red Team literally spends half of this issue sitting around holding hands.

Nothing in this story makes sense. The X-Men hide from Jean Grey by running out of the room, apparently forgetting that Jean is a telepath. Nightcrawler teleports Storm thousands of miles around the globe, once again violating decades old rules about how his powers work. Storm attacks Cassandra Nova with a tidal wave. I guess Tom Taylor thinks that tidal waves are caused by wind. Finally, the X-Men somehow defeat Cassandra Nova by holding hands. At the end, Cassandra Nova casually takes over Rachael Grey's mind, dispite Grey being a powerful and experienced telepath.

Tom Taylor isn't interested in learning about the characters he writes, their individual motivations or even how their powers work. None of the characters has any personality, except for Honeybadger, who's personality is terrible. But Taylor makes up for his lack of effort with plenty of virtue signaling, which is good enough for Marvel these days. more

Astonishing X-Men is the best x-book out right now. I think this could signal the beginning of a X-Men revival over the next few months. This is long overdue considering that x-fans like myself havebeen forced to suffer mostly garbage over the last six years.

Twenty pages where nothing happens. The first half of this book is wasted on Gentle, an obscure character that nobody cares about. The second half is spent preparing for an unnecessarily elaborate heist which is then mostly skipped over. The closest thing to action in this book is when Nightcrawler teleports the team onto the transport plane, once again ignoring 40+ year old rules about how Nightcrawler's powers work.

As I recall from Grant Morrison's New X-Men, Cassandra Nova was motivated to kill mutants by a desire for revenge against her brother Professor Xavier. Now that Xavier is dead (sort of) Taylor claims that Nova wants to kill all mutants because, well ..., she's afraid of mutants? None of this makes sense.

Honey Badger is still awful, and she's dragging the once great X-23 down with her. more

Bringing Honey Bagder into this book almost ruins it. I'm not sure if this decision was Tamaki's or if it was mandated by editorial, but it drags down what otherwise would have been a pretty good book. X-23 was always written as a very dark, borderline sociopathic character for a decade before Brian Michael Bendis decided to denude her of any personality in his All New X-Men. Tom Taylor doubled down on this terrible development by creating Honey Badger, a character who seemingly exists simply for Laura to have inane conversations with her. Mariko Tamaki should do herself a favor and kill off Honey Badger ASAP.

Otherwise, the art was pretty great. I also liked how the Stepford Cuckoos have returned to being more or less identical. Another Bendis sin was when he tried to give the three remaining Cuckoos individual looks and personalities. But by making them distinct from each other, he removed the thing that made them different from all the other students, and that made them boring. I hate Bendis so much. Kudos to Tamaki for going full Cuckoo. more

Coastes' writing has improved so much since he began on Black Panther two years ago that he's almost unrecognizable. He's progressed from being a terrible writer to merely being boring. This book was a snoozefest. It started out well enough with plenty of action and great art from Leinil Francis Yu, but the second half of the book was a waste. Sharon's reluctance to help with the investigation is never explained, nor is her and Steve's aversion to Thunderbolt Ross.

The worst part of the book has to be the bad poetry Coates inflicts on us. "We have forgotten that true freedom is a problem. A question, not an answer. Freedom from what? For what? And having lost our way in the storm, we found shelter." I just threw up in my own mouth. Somebody please free me from Coates' pretentious writing. If the editors had simply excised this tripe from the last five pages and replaced it with nothing the book would have immediately doubled in quality.

I'm not sure if Coates really understands Selene or if she's just some generic bad guy to him. I suppose we'll find out in future issues. more

Coates' writing has improved enormously from the Black Panther books of just a few months ago. That said, a major source of confusion in this book comes from the dogfight scene at the beginning when Future T'Challa demonstrates a short range teleporting ability which he calls 'space folding'. The first time it happened I almost missed it. It wasn't emphasized well by the art. He does this two more times and even his allies express confusion about what is happening. It's not clear if this ability is built into his zulu fighter or if it comes from somewhere else. This all could have been better explained.

Future Killmonger looks really cool but it was embarrassing to see him steal that 'mercy' line from the Black Panther movie (which was in turn borrowed from Hickman's New Avengers). Thinking of it makes me wonder how good this book could be if it was written by a real comic book writer like Hickman. more

This is the best Cable book from Nadler and Thompson so far. The thing that stands out most to me in comparison to other current Marvel books is that the different characters have distinct voices. This shouldn't be such a big deal but compared to almost every other Marvel book today this is unheard of. If Tom Taylor wrote this book all the characters would speak exactly the same. Cable would speak like Shatterstar, who would sound just like Boom Boom, who talk just like Warlock. The fact that these writers took the time and care to give each character their own unique and historically appropriate voice makes Nadler and Thompson two of the best writers currently working at Marvel. It's a shame that this book is getting canceled while garbage books like Iceman get renewed.

I also appreciate how the writers mined past X-Force continuity. And the art's not bad. more

Reading this near perfect book is like traveling through time and seeing Marvel before it self destructed.

So far this book has not demonstrated a reason fo exist. It feels redundant and irrelevant, with its generic mutant persectution storyline. It scores some point as its heart is in the right place as a plea against prejudice. It even sets a major showdown in currently right wing Poland as a place which goes all out to persecute mutants with its army.
But there is no character development. It’s six issues and we still don’t know what it feels like for Jean Grey to be back from the dead. The new mutants, Trinary, are boring. Thor Storm is tacky and the presence of Namor is jarring, especially in his save the day final appearance at the end of the book.
I guess further character development for Jean is being postponed till after Extermination. By the way, the one page preview of Extermination is the best part of the book.
Not a fan of Asrar’s sketchy art either. more

Blah.

Someone should explain to Tom Taylor how Nightcrawler's powers work. It's a strain for Nightcrawler to teleport someone in addition to himself and he would never port four people at once. Also, he never teleports somewhere he can't see unless the situation is dire. These are the sorts of things an editor should catch. This book has four of them.

Jean says "We're going to have their backs." Why does Jean speak like a millennial? Here's a tip. When the characters of a story all speak like the writer, it means the writer is not doing his job.

Apparently all the Polish military needs is for their political leaders to start issuing crazy orders and they immediately start shooting civilians. When the X-Men confront them they actually allow the army to fire at the mutants for a moment before Jean remembers that she's a powerful telepath. She then mind zaps everyone except the general. First of all, a general would never personally oversee a mass killing, that's what Colonels are for. Second, tactically speaking, if you were going to mind control a group quickly and in the heat of battle, keeping in mind your own limitations, it seems like you should start with the officers. This is why Storm should be leading this group.

Speaking of tactical mistakes, Tom Taylor singles out Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in a clumsy allusion to the real life aversion these countries have for muslim refugees. But at the same time he makes it clear that the political leaders are being mind controlled by Cassandra Nova, which would effectively absolve them of any moral responsibility. Taylor actually manages to neutralize his own virtue signaling, which would pretty impressive if he had done it intentionally.

On the plus side, Honey Badger didn't do anything stupid in this issue. more

This book tastes like virtue signaling and bad writing.

I usually have pretty low expectations for annual issues, and Tom Taylor managed to live down to my expectations in every way. The thing most people will focus on is the terrible hot dog line. I think back to the classic 70's and 80's books written by Chris Claremont (the all time best X-Men writer) and how he dealt with bigotry. He didn't bring it up in every single issue but he did touch on it fairly frequently. Instead of portraying regular people as cartoonish bigots, Claremont would often write them as conflicted about their feelings towards mutants. They would express genuine concerns about their own safety or the safety of their families in a world with mutants. By the end of the story they would often have reassessed their view of mutants, usually after seeing the X-Men do something ennobling. Claremont knew that his readers were mostly kids and he wrote simple moral parables for them. In contrast Tom Taylor writes for an audience of self righteous adults to whom he relentlessly conveys that he is a good and virtuous person.

The usual X-Men Red criticisms apply. The art makes all of the women look ugly. Jean looks like a forty two year old stripper. The characters have no individual personality. Honey Badger is awful.

The line about the Phoenix holding Jean back makes absolutely no sense. I don't expect every X-Men writer to be an expert, but for a book that lists four different editors and assistant editors you would think somebody could spot huge mistakes like this. more

The art is uneven, Jean Grey half the time looks like she has a man's body, I just don't understand what's going on there. The dialogue is about the most awful garbage I've ever seen. I mean, seriously, stop and read it out loud. Read the interaction between Logan and Jean and see how awful it is. It makes no sense, she just comes off like a jerk.

The story is about as boring as possible, the artwork is bad, why was this printed? Just so we could get that, "Tastes like mustard and bigotry!" line? Oh, such witty dialogue. Is Dan Slott one of the few decent writers left at Marvel??? more

This book was confusing. It wasn't until the end that I realized that this is all taking place in the future. I guess the space Wakandans have evolved into these gray skinned guys with barracuda teeth? But a few still look like regular earth brothers. I'm not sure why the guards didn't just kill future T'challa when he tried to escape. Also, all the flashbacks and flash-forwards added to the confusion. This book seriously needs an editor.

Acuna's art sort of works for SciFi. more

Only Jonathan Hickman can save Marvel comics.

This book is so boring that it takes a considerable effort just to review it.

The cover art makes Laura look ugly. The dialog is interchangeable (this is typical for a Tom Taylor book). The team already switches to their second hideout in this relatively new series. Hopefully they will stay there for awhile, but it makes you wonder why Taylor wasted any time at all on Wakanda. The powers of the fairly obscure character Gentle are never explained. The motivations of Cassandra Nova are still unexplained. The book is only 20 pages. For four dollars Marvel still steals two pages from us.

This team is too big. One of the final pages shows eight team members, and this doesn't even include Gambit. As a result, good characters like Nightcrawler and X-23 have very few lines. You could easily get rid of Namor and Gentle. Taylor can't write Gambit well anyway so you can get rid of him as well. Honeybagder should be excised from all Marvel continuity.

The greatest insult comes at the very end where Forge is revealed to be under the control of Cassandra Nova. This is unforgivable. more

Eight dollars for a twelve page superman story by Bendis. I especially like how on his very first issue he is already making major continuity changes. I can't wait for him to make Superman gay! As a Marvel fan, I am perfectly happy to see Bendis go to DC.

Jim Lee's art is the only reason I didn't give this book a lower rating.

Apparently russian bots are tricking everyone into hating mutants. Those guys ruin everything.

Meh. A filler issue where nothing much happens. Nightcrawler doesn't say anything. Laura says RRRRRR! And Honeybadger is still retarded.

I think Gambit is a difficult character to write well. No writer has really done a good job with Gambit since the 90s. I would say that if you can't write Gambit well you should leave him off the team. Instead Tom Taylor wastes 5 pages on a useless Gambit scene that adds nothing to the story. more

A pretty good issue in a great series.

Wow this is garbage. Jean isn't nearly as hot as she should be. X-23 isn't as dark as she should be. Nightcrawler has no personality. Come to think of it, none of these characters seem to have any personality with the possible exception of the newly introduced Trinary. Honey Badger is an incredibly worthless character. Also, the art sucks.

There seems to be a new mandate for the X-Men books that they are only allowed to fight with humans. They need to go back to fighting evil mutants. more

The timeline makes absolutely no sense, but the action and Jon Malin's art with 90's costumes makes this a fun read.

Terrific. I'm glad to see that this story seems to have a lot of road ahead of it.

Five dollars worth of garbage.