X-Men #14: A Snowbird On A Wyre

Hot off the Manhunt event, along with the Alpha Flight team-up, Ryan Stegman is back in the artistic shoes as we see the team help find a little girl who has gone missing. Piper Cobb, who turns out to be a twin who was absorbed into Piper, who just so happens to be a mutant! Plus Magneto and Ben Liu have a heart to heart on Ben’s future, and how his future will be tied to saving the earths mutants. So let’s get on with the show!

Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman are back, and they’ve brought back a forgotten treasure from the original Alpha Flight run, Wyre, who is a part of 3K, along with Cassandra Nova, who’s on the hunt for Piper, along with Quinten and Jen, while Cyclops and Hank are playing switchboard back at the HQ. MacKay’s work on this book has been pretty even. It’s not horrible, but it all feels so unimportant, and underwhelming for what should be considered the flagship title of the X-Men franchise. The cast has been around for a year, and we’ve seen little growth from any of the cast members. Even the new characters that have been added since the book started feels so bland, and uninteresting to read.

The book has gotten better since the end of the rather unbelievably boring Assault on Graymalkin, that lead into the equally uninteresting X-Manhunt that ran through all of the X-books last month, especially with MacKay adding Alpha Flight into the mix. You can tell MacKay (a Canadian) has a real love and reverence for Canada’s premiere superteam, and it’s equally impressive seeing a rather 90’s cliche character like Wyre, added to the ranks of 3K. He’s even using a plot that’s eerily similar to Alpha Flight members Goblyn and Pathway. Two twin mutants, whose parents tried to abort Goblyn while she was still in the womb, but that activated Laura’s (Pathway) mutant ability to open up portals, where she would save her sister’s life. While Piper and her twin’s story wasn’t exactly that (Piper “absorbed” her twin in utero), but it’s similar enough for an old Alpha Flight fan like me to pick it up, so kudos to Jed on that.

It’s always apparent when Ryan’s got a fill-in artist on the book, because my interest in it plummets. Not that Netho Diaz is a bad artist, far from it. It’s just that Ryan’s set the tone for this book, and it’s hard to see someone else play in Ryan’s playground. I’ve said it before, but I’m honestly shocked at how well I enjoy Ryan on this book, because outside of the Spider-Man franchise, Stegman usually bores me. It’s how I felt on his run on Inhuman, and especially on his Uncanny Avengers. But here, I don’t know. He’s cracked the code, and his style is the one I’m most drawn (lol) to. Hopefully we’ll see him work his magic on Alpha Flight, if they ever return to the book to finish out this 3K storyline. I want to see their reaction to seeing their former teammate Wyre on the side of this nefarious organization.