If anything has become apparent over the last few years, it’s that the X-office loves to do anthology books. And why not? With plenty of mutant characters jostling for page-time and a limited number of books, it doesn’t hurt to have the occasional outlet for characters (and creators) who wouldn’t get much of the spotlight.

The only problem? Anthology titles, by their nature, are always uneven reads. What you enjoy will vary from person to person, but it’s rare you’ll enjoy everything, and even on a technical level, it’s rare that the strips will all be stand-out good. If, like me, you’re a glutton for punishment, the arrival of yet another X-anthology – this time dealing with mutantkind’s relocation to Asteroid M – promises pleasure and pain in equal measures.

With that in mind, let’s not dwell too heavily on the individual stories. Si Spurrier and Leonard Kirk’s ghost-house riff, starring Magneto, is a strong lead, presenting the very believable suggestion that after all that’s happened, Magneto may have actually won. A point also made in by Yost and Bertilorenzi’s Iceman strip, as part of a wider illustration about Bobby’s reservations with the team’s situation. Scott Snyder and David Lopez make good use of Colossus’ past as a farmhand and offer some rather overdue scenes with the newly resurrected Illyana. However, it’s James Asmus and Mike Allred’s Wolverine/Nightcrawler road trip which justifies the cover price – in my opinion, it’s actually moments of downtime like this that make the X-Men worth reading.

So, not a bad bunch overall – but the real question is how well the anthology serves its purpose – and in that, things are less certain. Iceman and Magneto’s shorts deal with the themes of “Nation X” very directly – the tension of living alongside your enemies, the suggestion that Xavier’s dream of peaceful integration has failed, the uncertain pessimism about the future – but the best strip in the issue pays scant regard to Nation X, while Colossus’ uses Asteroid M as mere background for yet another piece about how he needs to get over his girlfriend dying.

As a whole, then, the issue is balancing on a knife edge, not quite relevant enough to Nation X to make it worth purchasing, but not quite bad enough to make it worth avoiding. To be honest, the promise of both a Jubilee story and Becky Cloonan’s Gambit short in future issues is enough to make me optimistic that the best is yet to come, but the feeling I’m increasingly getting from these anthologies is “we’ll make them because they sell, but we don’t really know what to do with them.”

There’s plenty of news worth commenting on straight out of Wizard World Chicago as the Summer’s con season truly gets going, including reflections on the unfortunate passing of Mike Turner, Ghost Rider news (seriously), the near-mythical Superman 2000 pitch and Eric Stephenson’s recent promotion.
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