Extermination

When Bendis brought the original five X-Men — Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Jean Grey — to the present day in “All-New X-Men” there was only one way their story was going to end.  That would be with them going back to their original time. This is something that the writer never demonstrated that he understood in the stories he told with these characters. While subsequent writers Dennis Hopeless and Cullen Bunn did their level best with that setup and even wrung some good stories out of it, “Extermination” is the expected end to the whole saga of these time-displaced X-Men.  What we get with this five-issue event series from writer Ed Brisson and artist Pepe Larraz (with Ario Anindito pitching in on issue #4) is the brute-force method of wrapping up their story. I say this because it involves a villain who has had no relation to their story, or even a notable presence in recent X-Men comics, coming in to ruin everyone’s day. That would be Ahab, the mutant-hating time traveller from Rachel Summers’ timeline showing up to kill the time-displaced X-Men before they can go back to their own time period.

There’s a “Calvin and Hobbes” quote that I’ve always liked which is applicable here:  “If you can’t go for reason, go for volume.” While it may have worked for Calvin, it’s less effective as the main strategy employed by the “Extermination” creative team.  Brisson and Larraz throw up an energetic, tireless front as they burn through conflicts and action scenes at a relentless pace over the course of the miniseries. Which is good because the story they’re telling really doesn’t have any substance to it.  “Extermination’s” two goals are to shuffle the time-displaced X-Men off of the board and introduce some major changes in the Summers family. It accomplishes those goals in a way that leaves little room for any kind of emotional attachment to the story being told.  It winds up accomplishing all this in a serviceable manner, which isn’t as good as it should be for a story that’s very necessary to the current state of the “X-Men.”