Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand

Collects Uncanny X-Men #495-499 written by Ed Brubaker with art by Michael Choi.

There is no doubt that Brubaker is one of the hottest writers around these days. The Daredevil book hasn't looked as good as it does right now in ages. Captain America is one of the most interesting Marvel reads these days. And the three Criminal books have all amazed readers and critiques alike. But his Uncanny X-Men somehow fail to make this list. It's simply not very good. It started out pretty well with Deadly Genesis. Then came Rise And Fall Of The Shi'ar Empire which was decent, but nothing special. The Extremists then started the downwards slide towards where we are today. Messiah Complex was good, but you couldn't really tell Brubaker's voice from the rest of the authors.

And now, post-Messiah Complex, we have Divided We Stand. Which simply put, isn't very good. The X-Men are supposed to be disbanded, but this doesn't stop them from sticking together. Colossus, Nightcrawler and Wolverine go to Russia to get messed up in some bland brawl. And the rest get caught in a situation in San Francisco where the city is slowly being infested with a hippie state of mind caused by a mutant psychic whose identity I won't disclose, although I suspect people really don't care that much.

This book follows the pattern of X-Men: Divided We Stand in that it seems to be a setup story, although it is more vague in what will happen and it takes a lot of time to get there. What is told in five chapters here could just as well have been told in two or three chapters, and that would probably have made it better.

It seems to me that Brubaker never really achieved what he wanted with the X-Men. Fatal Genesis brimmed with boldness and new ideas, but that sort of faded away after a while. Maybe this has to do with the infamous editorial intervention, but who am I to tell? From the next Uncanny book Brubaker will be sharing the writing credits with Matt Fraction, until Fraction takes over completely, so things are looking up.

I'm not a big fan of Choi, although I think his technique is interesting. He employs a minimalist approach to line work leaving graduations and shadings to be taken care of by the colorist. I wonder how this works out work-wise? If all Choi does is the line work, I'd think the color artist, Sonia Oback, probably put more work into this book than Choi, but I'm just speculating here. All in all, I think the art is a little too static for an X-Men book, Choi doesn't seem to be used to drawing a lot of action scenes. He does seem to have a knack for drawing tech stuff, like big robots, so maybe he would be better off on a SF series of some sort?

This book is far from the quality it should have with a writer like Brubaker, and thus qualifies as a bit of a disappointment. Here's to hoping that things will get better when the transition to Matt Fraction as the writer on the series starts with the next event: Manifest Destiny.

3/10