Honestly, I thought the last chapter of "Hope" was the weakest of the arc, with some seemingly rushed artwork and a couple of confusing moments, but it has a terrific finale in the last couple of pages, and still remains the best the Uncanny X-Men has been in quite a while. Austen seems to be setting up his own direction on the title, which almost always includes a few changes to characters, and the addition of a couple new faces along with one character getting a facelift of sorts definitely gives the sense that he's putting his own stamp on the book.
I'm always a little wary of villains whose powers are ill-defined, because while they give the writer plenty of leeway, they usually wind up looking like they were beat by editorial fiat. In other words, it wasn't a combination of powers or strategy that defeated them, but the impending arrival of page 22. There's a little bit of that here, as Tom's vegetable powers and incomprehensible speech make his motivations and desires unclear for most of this issue, but how he was defeated turns out to be pretty much incidental to the point of the story anyway.
In fact, this story was all about character changes for a couple of people, and a big change back to status quo for one of the X-Men. The change of appearance that results from Tom's powers is not at all clear, but the end result is pleasing to the eye, undoing a long-time change of one of the original X-Men. The resolution with Juggernaut and the new "fish" mutant was a nice bit of storytelling, and I hope we'll see more of the latter character in future issues... I'm sure we'll see plenty of the former.
I've been pleased with Garney's and Morales's artwork on the book in the last few issues, but this issue shows some of the weaknesses I saw in his art early on in the run. Specifically, the characters's faces are indistinguishable from one another and too expressionless, which means that the dialogue has to carry a lot more weight than it should have to, and the action sequences aren't terribly clear.
While the overall story in this issue was disappointing in light of the solid performance the creative team has turned in for the first two issues of their run, I still have plenty of hope for future issues. That's largely down to a very strong finale and a brief interlude that reintroduces a forgotten X-Man back into the team, in a way that was unexpected and told more about a supporting character than one of the X-Men. It's clear that Austen has plans for this book, and I'm curious to see where he will take readers next.
