Uncanny X-Men by Kieron Gillen vol. 2

Gillen begins this volume by picking up where “The Dark Angel Saga” left off, after a fashion.  While Angel’s personality was reset and the Horsemen of Apocalypse were defeated, that still left a giant biosphere — Tabula Rasa  — where evolution was accelerated some 65 million years into the future.  Though the story is months old at this point, we’re informed by Psylocke that this all happened yesterday giving Cyclops’ “Extinction Team” a good reason to go check it out now.  What follows is an entertaining science-fiction adventure, but not the high point of the collection.

Though having the cast split up to explore unfamiliar surroundings is often a death sentence for some of them in almost any genre, it gives the cast here room to breathe as they all have their own agendas to pursue and issues to work out.  Colossus and Illyana get to admire the strange beauty of the place, while the former makes unpleasant discoveries about his new powers while trying to rescue the latter.  Storm gives Cyclops grief about the current “schism.”  Being the only one on the team aware of X-Force, Magneto takes the time to grill Psylocke on the team’s involvement in Tabula Rasa.  Most entertainingly, Hope and Namor go to explore the environment’s aquatic regions and wind up bonding as she learns about the finer parts of diplomacy between aquatic royalty.  The banter between them is very good and it also has the effect of making the normally insufferable Namor someone I wanted to see more of here.

The core story, however, involves the two surviving members of the species native to Tabula Rasa and how one wants to restart it by sucking all of the Celestial energies from the land and killing everything else in the process.  Our heroes team up with the survivor’s “unwife” and what results is a solid round of superhero fisticuffs enlivened by the interplay between the characters… and the art.  Yes, I can hardly believe that I’m saying this but Greg Land is having one of his better periods as the “posing” of his characters feels a lot more natural and the manic grinning is kept to a relative minimum.  Land also shows himself to have some very good design sense here as the environment looks and feels suitably weird for what it is.  I guess this is a reason to look forward to his upcoming run with Gillen on “Iron Man.”

All that said, the second story is easily the better of the two.  Now this may be down to my personal bias as this features the return of Unit from Gillen’s “ultimately a mini-series” “S.W.O.R.D.”  In case you’ve forgotten, I really liked that story and Unit, the supremely arrogant and genocidal robot survivor of a species determined to bring utopia to the galaxy was a big part of the reason why.  He may be a calculating psychopath, but he’s just so polite and clever in being so that you can’t help but love (to hate) him.  The story itself involves S.W.O.R.D.’s brig breaking free and plunging to Earth, unleashing a horde of the galaxy’s worst criminals on Earth.  It’s material worthy of a crossover, which Gillen expertly manages in less than an issue as the X-Men team up with the Avengers (FOR THE LAST TIME *DUM DUM DUMMMMM!!!*) to rein in all of the intergalactic miscreants.

The real meat of the story, though lies in the second issue when the Extinction Team departs the conflict to rescue Hope, who has come face-to-face with Unit in Canada.  There’s some good fight scenes early on as the robot effectively dismantles the team regardless of their special abilities.  I won’t give away the resolution of the fight, but it works in way that makes you go, “Wait, that shouldn’t be possib– Ohhhhh!  Now I see what’s going on here.”  The story itself also serves as a nice lead-in to “Avengers vs. X-Men” as the cracks begin to show in the relationship between the two teams.  Things are also set up for Unit and Hope to have their own special relationship as the former knows a lot of things about the Phoenix that no one else is willing to tell her.  Carlos Pacheco and Paco Diaz provide the art for these two issues and it’s pretty sharp too.

Overall, the familiarity of the storytelling here is offset by the execution and fans have another worthy volume of “Uncanny X-Men” to add to their collection.  The next two volumes (or one if you’re going to pick up the “Avengers vs. X-Men Companion” like me) represent Gillen’s swan song for the title and even though he’s going to be replaced by Bendis, I’ll be sad to see him go.