It's an odd week for the X-books - five titles came out, but most of them aren't doing a great deal.  However, since the rest of the industry wasn't having a particularly thrilling week either (and I've been too busy to make much headway on my trade paperback pile), we might as well see what the de facto flagship title is doing.

Uncanny X-Men has a slightly odd position in the line these days.  After all, notionally Astonishing X-Men is meant to be the flagship.  And the sales tend to back that up.  But Astonishing is largely self-contained, and besides, it never comes out.  That leaves Uncanny to carry the burden of being the real major X-Men title, in the sense of doing the hard work of driving the line - particularly now that X-Men has been relaunched as something different, however vaguely that something may be defined.

However, Uncanny X-Men has an anniversary coming up.  Issue #500 is just around the corner, and apparently it sets up the new direction for the X-Men titles.  This might explain the rather odd position that the X-books currently find themselves in.  "Messiah Complex" read for all the world like a storyline which was designed to move things along.  To some extent, it did that - it launched a couple of spin-off titles, and it provided the thinnest possible pretext for closing down the school.  But it didn't replace it with anything new, or even set the X-Men off in any particular direction.  So, on the face of it, we are now being regaled with a few months of thumb-twiddling while we wait for issue #500.

Actually, I give Brubaker more credit than that; I'm sure this plays into his new direction somehow or other, not least because San Francisco continues to feature in the solicitations.  But that's not readily obvious from the story itself, and I remain a little dubious about the way the X-office is approaching this.  They had a lot of momentum coming out of "Messiah Complex"; but "Divided We Stand" has come across as a gentle detour - not just in this book, but generally.

Uncanny is now halfway through its five-part "Divided" arc.  In practice, it consists of two seemingly unrelated storylines.  On the one hand, Scott and Emma show up in San Francisco to investigate a mutant who's apparently turned the clock back to the sixties.  For the moment, they've kept her identity rather vague, so it remains to be seen whether this is somebody we've seen before (in which case the obvious candidate would be Mastermind), or somebody new (now that Young X-Men has established a precedent for treating it casually again). 

Superficially, this is a fun little story, with Scott and Emma dressed as hippies, and everyone looking rather silly.  Scott's still acting decidedly out of character, mind you, and if he's not a Skrull, it's going to take a lot of work to convince me of this take on the character.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the other half of the story sees Colossus being attacked by the authorities during a trip home.  This turns out to be a rather interesting plot, as the Russians have picked up on an obvious glitch with M-Day which most stories have tried to brazen past.  If almost all the world's mutants lost their powers, how come the X-Men were virtually unaffected?  Of course, we know it's because they're the stars.  (As Tom Brevoort recently confirmed on his blog, they did seriously intend to depower Iceman, but then bottled it.)

The Russians, naturally enough, see things differently.  These guys are either ludicrously lucky, or they must know something.  Again, this is the sort of story that actually gets some short-term use out of M-Day by turning its problems to advantage.  It'll still have to be reversed in the end - we've still seen nothing whatsoever to suggest that it's viable as a long-term status quo - but stories like this are at least making something of it while we're stuck with it.

After a shaky start to the arc, Mike Choi and Sonia Oback have hit their stride and are producing some rather good artwork.  Yes, it's perhaps a little bit too pretty, and might benefit from being a touch rougher around the edges.  But they do a great Colossus, and they've gone to town on Scott and Emma's sixties costumes, which are nicely designed.

I'm not sure where any of this is heading, and really, it's one of those stories where you need a little faith in the writer to accept that it's heading anywhere in the wider scheme of things.  It may be a little too far removed from the bigger picture.  But it's a fun little story, which gets the X-Men out there to fight some bad guys, and it looks lovely.  As a bridge between bigger stories, though, I'm perfectly happy with it.

Rating: A-

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