The first X-title to come out after Messiah Complex has a lot of weight to bear in terms of setting the tone for the rest of the line in the post-crossover universe, so it’s a bit strange to see Uncanny X-Men not just ignoring, but almost contradicting large elements of Messiah Complex’s conclusion.

Firstly – it seems that Cyclops’ claim that “there are no X-Men” wasn’t quite as final as it sounded, because what’s actually happened is that the X-Men are all taking a holiday while they decide what happens next. Secondly, and rather more bafflingly, it’s made totally explicit in this issue that the X-Men don’t believe Xavier is dead and that Cyclops has sent Beast out to look for him. A strange thing to do, considering we last saw Xavier’s corpse slumped on the ground after being shot in the head (ah, but did you notice Xavier’s mysteriously disappearing body in that last panel?! No, me neither.) I suspect the cause the confusion is that the gap between the last panel of Messiah Complex and the first panel of Uncanny #495 is going to be filled in by X-Men: Legacy #208 which regrettably isn’t due out until later this month.

Those are two fairly big flaws, but it’s not like they ruin the comic. In fact, the globe-trotting structure of this issue really feels like a throwback to the X-Men’s heyday, where the characters were rarely in the same place together, and were usually investigating entirely separate plots – so we get Cyclops and Emma vacationing in the Savage Land, double-dating with Shanna and Ka-Zar while trying to decide where the X-Men go now that Xavier and his dream are no longer relevant, and we get Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler heading out to visit Russia. Meanwhile Angel turns up in San Francisco and discovers that it’s unexpectedly become the 60s, and manages to contact Cyclops for help just before he too succumbs to whatever’s going on.

What we’ve actually ended up with is a really decent issue that could slot nicely into any era of X-Men. The light-hearted road-movie feel of Logan, Kurt and Piotr pranking and brawling their way across Europe is pure 80s Claremont, in a good way. The Angel plot suggests that the other X-Men are actually going to do some genuine, non-mutant focused superheroics which hasn’t happened in years and might actually make a nice change of pace.

The thing is, as good as this issue is, after a massive crossover like Messiah Complex… it’s hardly the new direction we were promised. Perhaps it’s intentional - X-Men, Cable, X-Force, Young X-Men and X-Factor all appear to be dealing far more directly with the fallout, so perhaps Uncanny’s “place” in the X-Line is to provide a refuge from that. For now I’m just enjoying it as a nice, light X-Men story and assuming that the real meat of the post-Messiah Complex situation will be digested elsewhere.