By Victor Gischler, Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-480-5
With a property as valuable as the X-Men change is a necessarily good thing, even if you sometimes need a scorecard to keep up. This thoroughly entertaining read (collecting X-Men volume 2 #1-6 and text features from Marvel Spotlight: X-Men: Curse of the Mutants #1) keeps the baggage to a sustainable minimum for non-addicts and concentrates on delivering a tense and fast-paced rollercoaster thriller heavy on action and light on extended sub-plots.
Most of the World’s mutants now live on an island dubbed “Utopia†in San Francisco Bay, welcomed by the easygoing human population and with X-Men team-leader Cyclops running the show. In other news: the planet’s assorted vampire clans have been united after centuries of internecine struggle by Xarus, the son of Dracula who destroyed his own father to succeed to the position of Lord of Vampires…
When a nosferatu suicide-bomber explodes himself in a crowded plaza his re-engineered blood infects many shocked and helpless bystanders with a manufactured virus that inevitably infects and overwhelms any mortal exposed to it. The united night-hunters have declared all-out war on their food-supply, bolstering their ranks without risking being hunted… and one of the first infected is veteran X-warrior Jubilee…
Wolverine leads a scouting mission into the increasingly overrun city and discovers that the campaign is meticulously organised and extremely far advanced. Moreover the new vampire lord has planned ambitiously: a key tactic is to “turn†every mutant on Utopia, providing the would-be conqueror with a compliant army of super-powered blood-sucking storm-troopers. Jubilee has already joined them…
Always genned-up on undead affairs, Blade joins the party and brings the embattled mutants up to speed, but facing impossible odds. With new vampires springing up everywhere Cyclops makes the seemingly insane decision to revive Dracula, despite the Vampire Hunter’s strenuous objections.
And then Wolverine finally succumbs to the manufactured virus and switches sides…
When the Children of the Night make their final assault against the assembled mutant heroes all seems lost… but Cyclops has a cunning plan…
Laced with a profusion of variant covers by such artistic stalwarts as Olivier Coipel, Marko Djurdjevic, Mike Mayhew and John Romita Jr. this is an exhilarating romp that pushes all the right buttons, engagingly written by Victor Gischler and entrancingly illustrated by Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco. If you want fast, furious and fulfilling Fights ‘n’ Tights magic this is a perfect one-shop stop for your edification and delectation.
™ and © 2010 & 2011 Marvel Entertainment LCC and its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. A British edition released by Panini UK Ltd.