It’s all over! Best post-Morrison X-Men story ever! (and a lot better than most pre-Morrison X-Men stories too.)

It’s fair to say that a lot of recent Marvel crossovers have dropped the ball in the final act, whether we’re talking the dead-end plots of of House of M and The Other, the hastily rewritten garbage of One More Day, or the anticlimatic surrender that capped off Civil War.

Messiah Complex isn’t entirely immune from that, but it’s far more balanced. Rather than feeling like it exists solely to set up a bunch of new stories,  it manages to feel like it’s told a story in its own right - the story of what happened to the first new mutant since M-Day, and the power struggle surrounding her. What it doesn’t reveal is the child’s identity, which is an interesting gamble - at this point it does look like she’ll actually be a new character.

The issue is rife with the things that I love about the X-Men. There’s a nod to X-History as Cyclops’ memory of sending the baby Nathan to the future informs his decision to release the “messiah” baby to Cable, and there are plenty of new moments destined to become iconic in their own right - Cyclops sending the New X-Men against the Marauders, Wolverine destroying Predator-X from the inside out, Cable fading away as he escapes to the future with the child, and of course, Bishop killing the Professor. I always knew the old geezer was going to play a major role in this story, and it’s quite the fall from grace for Bishop himself.

It’s not totally perfect - if there’s any massive failure in the final issue, it’s that Bachalo’s storytelling is, as with much of his recent work, too obscure to handle all the action. There are some sequences where it’s not easy to see what’s going on. The focus on Rogue in the final two issues comes way out of left field for anyone who hasn’t been reading Carey’s X-Men run, and would’ve benefited from a bit more set up in earlier chapters of Messiah Complex. The Professor’s death is a little undermined by the knowledge that he’s clearly coming back, and soon, according to the solicits (speaking of which, I’m glad I called Bishop for the villain in Cable’s series. I knew I’d get something right if I guessed enough!)

All in all, it’s an incredibly solid, mutant-packed crossover the likes of which we haven’t seen for far too long, and ultimately it’s achieved its aim of making me damn interested in where the X-Franchise is going, when previously (X-Factor aside) it’d only made it only my pull list out of a sense of duty and tradition more than anything else. Now I can’t wait for more. Hell, I might actually buy a Cable book just to see where his plot’s going…

Tags: Chris Bachalo, messiah complex, Mike Carey, X-Men
Publisher: Marvel