For a long time now, Uncanny X-Men has been the bastard stepchild of the X-Men line, going back to when it was the "not the Jim Lee" book through to the present, when it's the "not the Grant Morrison" book. At first, it looked like Austen might be redefining the book as the X-Men comic for those who were looking for something a little more traditional, but some strange elements, the decidedly unusual artwork of Kia Asamiya and some generally messy storytelling in this issue results in a weak, muddled read. There are some good ideas in Austen's take on the book, but each passing issue interests me less and less, and the "Dominant Species" arc so far is looking fairly unimpressive.
Austen has some good ideas, and he's playing around with the characters who are mostly out of the spotlight in the other books, which I like quite a bit. Second tier players like Havok, Angel and Iceman along with new team members like Husk, Juggernaut and Northstar makes for an unusual and new mix of members. But the bizarre costume design sense of Asamiya and the bizarre behavior of many of the characters makes them feel not just new but alien, unrelated in any way to their past incarnations and not interesting enough on their own to make up for it. Everyone seems to have one aspect that is their personality, and it's played to the extreme, whether it's Husk's desire to be on the team, Juggernaut's bitterness or Northstar's arrogance.
A lot happens in this issue, but considerably less of it makes any sense. Lorna Dane's behavior toward Annie is nonsensical, a good example of the overdramatic tendencies I was talking about, as rather than having her serve as simply an emotional threat, she also has to come off like a psychotic super-villainess. And the behavior of the villains, while familiar in a general sense as the "survival of the fittest" theme that has defined so many X-Men villains, seems calculated largely to make them seem scary and crazy. Instead, they seem ill-defined and uninteresting, and their ability to beat up the heroes so easily doesn't make them more impressive, it makes it seem like Austen is trying to impress upon us that they're nasty bad guys without doing the groundwork to establish it.
Then we come to the artwork by Kia Asamiya. I'll be honest, Asamiya's style isn't one that I generally appreciate anyway, but his first couple of issues on Uncanny surprised me by being easy to follow and pretty solid, if you leave aside the hideous new costume designs. This issue the work begins to look a little more rushed, a little more of what I expected, as the action scenes are hard to follow and the characters aren't drawn with any sort of consistency in terms of size or anatomy. I can appreciate a certain style, and things that irk some (like the big noses) don't bother me, but I'm less forgiving of poor storytelling or inconsistency, and the art this issue is riddled with it.
When Chuck Austen first came aboard the Uncanny X-Men, I lauded his run as surprisingly entertaining, considering that it was mostly conventional storytelling with familiar characters. This issue, and the one before it, almost seems like it was done by a different writer, as it has lost the conventional approach and the solid (if overly dramatic) characterization, cranking the melodrama up about two notches too high and losing much of the clarity and straightforward storytelling that made the book so enjoyable.
