X-Men Red #10: Solitaire

Al Ewing brings this chapter of his tale to a masterful conclusion with these highly climactic battles. Highlights included Cable’s skilled battle tactics, and reimagining Szen’s ‘useless’ weapon into a powerful intelligence-gathering tool. Ewing never settles for the easiest, most obvious path when he could choose another that is more effective, no matter how difficult the terrain becomes. 

Sunspot’s growth over the length of the series has been, as his former teacher intimated, both impressive and worrying. Has he become predator or prey, and if it’s the former, on whom is he preying? And while we are speaking of reimagined societal roles, let’s take a look at what’s happening with Storm. Her growing uneasiness with thrones has led to the formation of a mutant circuit of omegas, a group of already godlike people who are working together to bring down a creature who styles himself, King. This issue shows precisely what she meant when she decreed that there would be no thrones on Arakko, and it does so in a way that is as beautiful and emphatic as a bolt of lightning striking an otherwise empty plane. 

The weakest part of this story, for me, was Lodus Logos’ poem. I get that he exists as a symbol — a new society built on one of humanity’s greatest arts and the capacity for change — but the poem that was intended to enflesh that symbol was strikingly awful. Ewing is a writer with poetic flair, an ear for language, and an almost painterly eye for imagery, but he is not a poet. This excerpt would have been more effective as a speech or a data page; the clunkiness of the verses threw me right out of the saddle.

Stefano Caselli and Jacopo Camigni work together brilliantly, producing art that is remarkably detailed and setting scenes from which readers cannot turn away. Federico Blee’s color art is, as usual, teetering on the edge of perfection. The man can set the emotional tone of a story like no one else in his field.