X-Men: Red vol. 2 — Waging Peace

Here’s what I’m pretty sure is the last collected edition featured in the “Great Color Cull” of “X-Men” titles from last year.  It also makes a better case for itself this time around as the talk of changing the world takes a backseat to some well-crafted superhero action courtesy of writer Tom Taylor and artists Carmen Carnero and Roge Antonio.  By that I mean we’ve got Jean and her team staging a midair heist on a politician’s airplane that winds up going horribly wrong. There’s also a plan to spread hate via nano-sentinels, a tsunami attack on Genosha, Teen Abomination (no, really) smashing Atlantis, and lots of military forces being hijacked to spread the main villain’s hateful agenda.  It’s all ably rendered by Carnero and Antonio, who also do a decent job with the many little character moments sprinkled throughout the volume.

My guess is that Taylor saw the writing on the wall and realized that he wasn’t going to be able to follow through on the world-changing story he had planned.  He does nod to it a bit in the final pages, to little emotional effect. The change in approach is for the better as the story we get here is a good showcase for his character-writing skills and ability to serve up well-executed superhero action.  By that I mean the issues here focus on setting up credible threats to our heroes, only for them to be foiled because the villain didn’t realize how resilient and clever they were. Seriously, there’s some good back-and-forth struggling here between both sides that helped keep my interest in the story high until the end.  It also gets points for having its big climactic moment involve a team-up between Nightcrawler and Honey Badger where the former’s teleportation ability is utilized in a very unconventional manner. Good stuff all around, and now I’m just a bit sad we won’t be able to read more of it.