The second act of Messiah Complex essentially begins now with Cable – who has the mutant baby – on the run from Sinister, the X-Men and Predator X, and heading towards…somewhere. The X-Men themselves fending off the dearly departed O*N*E squadron who are infected with Nano-Sentinels and smashing the mansion apart with their regular Sentinels. But who’s responsible?

Seriously, I’m starting to suspect there’s never been an X-Crossover this good. A lot of the plots take a breather in this issue so that the bulk of it can be devoted to the X-Men trying to recover from the surprise attack on the mansion, and recover they do. Cyclops hasn’t been this badass in a long time, and Messiah Complex has gone a long, long was to making him a credible leader for the X-Men again. The way he quickly makes use of the available New X-Men, despite his earlier tactical decision to keep them out of the fight, is an excellent way to display this.

The ending is the first time a Messiah Complex cliffhanger has fallen slightly flat, for me, though largely because the dialogue – “Assemble the X-Force!” – sounds too much like an advertisement for the new series. It’s not helped by some fairly inspecific artwork on the final page, showing what appears to be the X-Force team - Wolfsbane, Caliban, Hepzibah, Warpath, X-23 and Wolverine – in what amounts to little more than a publicity shot for the new title because those characters aren’t really in the same place at the moment. This is made further confusing because when compared with the ACTUAL publicity material, it appears that the team will have lost 2 of those members by the time the series begins, which is a potential spoiler in one of several ways.

With a whole bunch of plot threads now wrapped up, it’s good to see some new ones being introduced for the next act of the crossover. Sinister’s temporary defeat came at a price, and the X-Men, having previously been on top of the situation, find themselves severely wrong-footed by Cable’s perceived betrayal (I’m still holding out that he’s on the right team, though.) I haven’t enjoyed a fight scene this much since the first time I read Ultimates, that’s for sure, but with that in mind, I’m hoping for a little more breathing room and some progress on the other plot threads in next week’s X-Factor.