X-Men #9: The wheels on the bus are falling down..

Chapter 3 of Attack On Graymalkin is here, and we take these two teams join forces as they take on the Graymalkin jailers, to save their teammates. Everything seems to be going well until the two teams reach Charles Xavier’s prison cell. There’s a problem with what Xavier did while on Krakoa, as well as the actions he was a part of in the Fall of the House of X mini, which was the catalyst for the From the Ashes era. Rogue and Cyclops have very different views on what they should do with Xavier, which looks to be what the upcoming Manhunt storyline coming next year will be about. So let’s get on with the show.

Most of these heroes vs. heroes stories have the flimsiest situations that cause them to fight, with this story being just like the others. The biggest shock was seeing which character took which stance, but nothing that was shocking to say the least. Rogue and Cyclops’ taking a hard line stance here feels very much like the post Schism/AvX era, which promised to bring big changes to the mutant world, but was just a smoke screen for more of the same. While mutants are no longer limited to a few hundred, and are once again a thriving minority population again, this enmity between Scott and Rogue seems…off.

Besides the weak premise behind the fighting, the threat that’s being posed by the prison heads is also just as flimsy. We’re led to believe that these unknown, and frankly incapable menaces are at all capable of holding the mutants that were being held captive here in this prison on the X-mansion grounds. Nobody strikes me as being competent, and the only character receiving any form of development is incredibly superficial, and lackluster. Corina Ellis’s portrayal in this story has been so lackluster that I had to go back to the recap page so I could remember her name. While not every character deserves to be a recurring character in comics franchises, creating a character that is memorable should be one of the team’s primary goals.

This chapter of the storyline feels like little more than filler, and is by far the biggest disappointment from MacKay’s run to date. This issue’s biggest positive was the art, as I’ve grown quite fond of Stegman’s take on these characters, but we also get some art from Federico Vicentini, who gives us a stellar performance here. The fight scenes being the most visually stunning of this book, Vicentini shows why he was in the last group of Stormbreakers. Get this man on a book already! Unfortunately even his work here couldn’t save this subpar story.