There is a lot of posturing. A lot of group shots of the X-Men looking like a group of superheroes. A lot of exterior shots of the city in Indonesia and a lot of sad sack looks at the people around this town filled with dead spaceships.

It's an intriguing idea and would be more so if it hadn't been done before, but it has. And Warren Ellis seems to be working on fumes here. Seriously, check out the first collected edition of his vastly underrated but nearly perfect Counter X stories involving X-Force. It's so much better than what is presented here, and that was damn near 10 years ago with a lot more editorial influence.

And I'll get to that in a bit.

So the X-guys find the man/mutant they were looking for and locate him in a spaceship just kind of docked and sitting in the sky. The funniest thing comes from how they will get the team up there. Storm mentions she can use the winds to get them up there, but Wolverine is a little too heavy. So Armor decides to, um, armor up, and throws him. She comments how heavy he is, and Wolverine says it's the adamantium and Armor asks if he's sure it's not the beer. Then throws him at a very very very fast speed in which she worries she may have killed him. And all Cyclops does is make her worry more. It's cute, but it works. It makes Cyclops seem human, which would have been great had the issue stopped right there.

So Wolverine confronts the man/mutant with the fire powers like every third mutant on the planet and they tussle. The rest of X arrive and confront him and he blows his own head up to keep things secret. That's the gist.

Yet again, not a lot happens. Beast completely vanishes from this issue, unless I'm completely mistaken, but he is the star of the cover. He's the only X-Man on the cover, and yet he's not in the issue. AT ALL. Why the hell would they do that? If I was a fan of Beast only and just bought comics based on his appearances, I'd be severely pissed. I don't as he's a character that I can give or take, but come on, really? Is it really that hard to whip up a cover with the actual characters inside the book at the time of the release? It's the same artist, you think he'd know who was in the book. Whatever.

The art by Bianchi is all right. It's no John Cassaday, but it'd be very hard to find a worthy replacement artist to him. Almost completely impossible, but the art is less muddy than before. However, his panel placement is ridiculous. There is no rhyme or reason to why he's doing what he's doing, it's just a sense of style that completely throws the book into a loop. There are a number of occasions in this issue alone where arrows would have made the comic an easier read. Just to follow the panels was a chore.

And then Ellis' script. The fact that the panel placement makes no sense makes it dreadful, but some of the ways Ellis has the characters talks makes it so much worse. It's like if Grant Morrison dropped a bunch of acid before writing a comic, smoked crack, and then did Whippets while driving an old beater car while typing the comic on a round trip road trip with a typewriter. The characters doesn't flow together in a cogent fashion. From time to time talking points correspond, but in others, it's like we're dropped into the middle of a conversation and we have no reason for that to happen as it is supposed to be literal seconds after the last panel. Unless the X-Men have all developed a new sense/power of super speak than I don't know why this is necessary.

Last gripe: get rid of Storm from this book. Ellis is writing her in a completely stupid fashion. She's being used as a moral compass even though she has killed. She's being used to question Cyclops' methods and new ideas on killing if need be. He says he grew up, she says he's different. And she still seems like a valley girl that holds no sense of elegance as she always did.

I'm at a loss with this comic. I want to give it one final shot, but I don't think it's worth 3 more dollars. Unless something completely awesome happens in the next issue, I think Warren Ellis has lost a fan. His writing seems to be completely idiotic and abrupt and almost as if it were written by a 15 year old wannabe pretentious prick. It's like he's trying to sound smart with this comic when really it's just coming off as hack. Ellis is this close to joining Mark Millar on the hack list, right alongside Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Bruce Jones, and Jeph Loeb. Getting really really close Ellis.