We haven’t covered ‘X-Men’ in a couple of issues so I’ll do a brief recap of what has been going on. The series opened with the ancient creature Arkea coming to Earth to take over the planet. She was briefly stopped and just as quickly was back into attacking the world. While the all female cast of X-Men have been nearly stopping her at every turn she decided to form a Sisterhood (of Evil Mutants). How Magneto-like, right? So who do we have up? We have Lady Deathstrike’s brain in a new body, a restored to power Amora the Enchantress, a no longer split personality Typhoid Mary, and two other characters being brought back to life in this issue.

Who the two characters are should prove quite interesting. One of them is Selene Gallio who is the ex-Black Queen of the Hellfire Club and the other is Madelyne Pryor, the ex-Red Queen of the HellFire Cult and clone of Jean Grey. Big news here but we’ll get back to these two in a moment. The Sisterhood and the X-Men are going head to head throughout the issue and the mutants are all holding their own.

First up, Monet drops Amora in half a heartbeat. Amora’s Asgardian abilities might be back but Monet is a force to be reckoned with and the way she knocks Amora down makes it clear she can easily go toe to toe with a Goddess. Psylocke handles Typhoid Mary nearly just as quickly and gets her to back down by threatening to recreate her split personality.

We’ll get to the big points in a second but we also got a great story at the tail end of the issue with the X-Students, commanded by Jubilee, taking out a slew of Sentinels. Quire gets a couple great moments here as well and we finally see some dialogue between a couple of characters anyone who has been following the series has been waiting for.

Now it is down to Arkea, Selene, and Madelyne vs the X-Men. For some reason, Arkea decided that her home base was going to be in an area that had her cut off from the electrical grid so there was no way for her to escape. How convienient. Madelyne instantly takes out Rachael but Storm has the rest of the team on call and cuts them a deal. Leave Arkea and they will let them walk or stay and be collatoral damage. Clearly we know what route they went as now Arkea was all alone and was taken down by a new form of technology that was invented just in time to take her out. Awesome.

So that left us with the formation and introduction of a great set of characters that really didn’t do a whole lot. The fights were beautiful and the character interactions were well written but the ending felt a little too unsatisfying and while there is a good chance we’re going to see good things come of this. Could we see a reformation of a Hellfire Club that is actually worth dealing with and not a bunch of spoiled teenagers who are pretty worthless? Will the return of Madelyne Pryor completely throw Scott Summers off his game and will this spill over to the ‘Uncanny X-Men’? While the issue itself was unfulfilling, I believe that these resurrections will pave the way to some very interesting story lines down the road. I’m sure the main focus will be a Sisterhood of villains vs the female X-Men but its nice to speculate.

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X-MEN #12
Writer: Brian Wood
Artist: Kris Anka