Well.

I will be the first to admit that Chuck Austen has an unenviable task with New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men this month.  This is a filler month bridging the gap between the end of the Morrison era and the beginning of the Reload stories in May.  Since not much was actually happening in Uncanny in terms of ongoing storylines - and those storylines that did exist will simply continue under the same management in the revamped X-Men - Austen isn't called on to do much with his own plots.  Instead, it seems his remit is to deal with set-up for other writers.

Although Austen and Larroca are technically taking over New X-Men, this is really a misnomer.  The reality goes more like this: the true successor title to New X-Men, inheriting most of its cast, is the Whedon/Cassaday book Astonishing X-Men.  The new Uncanny X-Men is largely a continuation from X-Treme X-Men, again taking many of the cast with it.  The previous Uncanny creative team and most of their cast decamp to X-Men, which is to all intents and purposes a continuation of that book.

Since they can't change the name on this title until next month (as that would pre-empt Reload), Austen is required to kill some time in two issues of New X-Men, which he attempts to do by tying up loose ends and, presumably, getting the school back in business in time for Astonishing.  The resulting issue, taken in isolation, is subpar but not absolutely horrible.  It's filler material, and filler with other writers' characters at that, and it's about what you'd expect.

However, against the background of previous issues of New X-Men, it's faintly baffling.  Honestly, you wonder whether anyone - Austen or his editors - actually read or at least understood the scripts for the last few months.  The point of the last scene in issue #154 is that Jean Grey influences Scott to say yes to Emma's proposals (pursue their relationship, reopen the school) and thereby builds a happier and better future.  Picking up straight where that issue left off, Austen goes straight back to having Scott say no again.

While this isn't absolutely contradictory to issue #154, it certainly runs counter to the spirit of it and damages the ending.  (Fortunately, these two issues are going to appear in an Uncanny X-Men trade paperback, so if you're buying the Morrison books in that form, you won't be saddled with these.)  You also have to wonder why the closing scenes of issues #151 and #154, unequivocally located in a graveyard, are now just up the hill from the X-Men Mansion.  When did the X-Men open their own graveyard, exactly?  And when did it get so full?

Then we have a plot about Cyclops and the Beast going into the mansion's sub-basements to find out whether Cassandra Nova is still safely contained after Magneto destroyed the mansion.  Of course, this doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, because Cassandra Nova was Ernst (something made perfectly clear last issue - and this issue's letters page shows that at least the assistant editor understood the plot).

To be fair to Austen, I'd place the blame for these discontinuities more on the editors than on him.  And it may be that he's actually heading towards a clearer explanation of the Cassie/Ernst link, which does have certain logic problems to it.  Without wanting to get boringly analytical, in issue #150, Magneto makes clear that he suspects Cassie is Ernst, but doesn't know for sure.  If Xorn, her teacher, didn't know who Ernst really was, then it's certainly conceivable that Scott and Hank didn't know either - and if that's the approach Austen's taking, then fair enough. 

I can't say history inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt here, but that reading would be consistent with Morrison's plot and would leave the way for an obvious dangling plot to be explained - a reasonable enough way to use the two issue gap.  We'll find out in a fortnight whether that's where they're going with this or not.

Salvador Larroca is drawing all four of this month's X-Men stories, and it has to be said that this issue looks a little rushed by his standards.  It's not bad, but it's by no means as beautiful as his recent Uncanny work.  The redesigned Beast doesn't agree with Larroca's style at all, and comes across like something out of Narnia - a shame, since he's a major character in the issue.

Anyhow.  This isn't a good issue by any stretch of the imagination, and it certainly reads as though those responsible didn't really understand the final Morrison issues.  But it could have been worse.

Rating: C-

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