I’m not going to lie. I’m starting to look forward to ‘Astonishing X-Men’ coming to a close. While it was a pretty good title I feel that at an increasing pace, its stories are far too removed from the events going on in the other currently running X-titles to be overly relevant.
After the events in ‘Astonishing X-Men’ #65, we’ve seen Iceman become a near God and almost kill off all of humanity. So this issue was a bit more of a break from the problems of the larger world that they usually have to deal with.
Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen.
When Northstar and Kyle return home from helping out in their homeland (don’t forget they are from Canada which is why they haven’t been helping out in New York with Snowmageddon going on) they end up running into Warbird taking things out of their home. When they question her, she mentions she was just trying to keep things safe from the snow. When they reveal that they thought she hated them from not showing up at their wedding, she looked shocked. She doesn’t hate them. She was only opposed to the marriage of two men. Times they are a-changing, as even this alien admits she is no longer sure she feels that way.
After that, we see Karma, Warbird, Storm, Gambit, Wolverine, and Jubilee take out Cece to a karoke bar. It’s entertaining watching the various members of the team laugh and sing (or in the case of Wolverine, stand and drink) and actually have a good time together.
That’s going great until some guy runs into the room and says he’s being chased by zombies. While no one believes him, that quickly changes as a group of people burst into the room and look quite undead. We quickly see they infect the first man who burst in by their touch not murderous bites. Cece throws a shield up to save them and we see that Karma finds that the people are being possessed and tells the team not hurt them as they have no control over their actions.
Storm shocks everyone with a low level charge of lightning and it knocks all of the people free. They track down whatever was mind controlling them and we find… a baby alien squid monster. How cute. It does get away though.
So I’m not quite sure where this is going, but I do know that in the next issue we’re going to see Wolverine and Gambit hanging out with this alien creature, running from other aliens, in a stolen Lamborghini. What could possibly go wrong with that kind of scenario? We’ll see as there are only 2 issues left before ‘Astonishing X-Men’ comes to a close! So whatever is going to go on with this alien, it’s doubtful it will have any kind of a lasting impact. My only question will be if the finale does or if it’ll just quietly bookend the series and not be too big of a deal with so many other ongoing mutant titles (many that already include some of these characters).
How much do you want to bet we see a new X-Men title pop up set in the current story line that breaks off of Battle of the Atom to make up for it? I’m not sure I want to see Marjorie on it, though. I really would love to see her take on a completely different set of characters. I think she’d be a good fit for Dr. Strange or, if it wasn’t in the middle of such a big arc, a Spider-Man title.
ASTONISHING X-MEN #66
Writer: Marjorie Liu
Penciller (cover): Phil No
