Ironically, it is Olivier Coipel who has made me realize the true strength of Uncanny X-Men, which is Alan Davis and Mark Farmer's artwork. The last few issues of Uncanny X-Men have been as painful to read as most of Claremont's X-Treme run, leading me to wonder how I could have been so intrigued by his first issue of Uncanny a few months back. Then I flipped to that gorgeous splash page that opens the book and realize that it's the combination of Davis's take on these characters and Claremont's penchant for old school plotting and action that got my attention. Unfortunately, Claremont's clunky and overly verbose writing style and tendency to drop plots in mid-story for other, less interesting stories make it hard to get genuinely excited, even when one issue comes along that is generally better than the rest.
I continue to be immensely frustrated by Claremont's modern writing on the X-Books. His is the work that serves as the backbone for the stories that everyone loves, and it's clear that the same strength of ideas remains, if not as consistent as it used to be. The mutant coroner of District X is a fun character, and the notion of a theme nightclub where people pretend to be mutants is a pretty clever extension of what Grant Morrison did when he added the notion of mutants as trend in New X-Men. I'm not quite as sold on the notion of X-23 (aka Wolverine's daughter), a character that some of the folks at Marvel seem to be in love with for reasons I don't understand, but Claremont does a reasonable job of introducing her here... albeit one that seems at odds with her appearances in NYX.
The real joy of the book, though, comes in the artwork. The Danger Room sequence is pretty goofy and very cliche, the kind of thing Claremont has done a lot of, but I always love seeing Nightcrawler's swashbuckling side and Davis, Farmer and D'Armata do just jaw-dropping work on that sequence. The work throughout is beautiful to look at, falling into the realm of eye candy, but at the same time, it features exquisite storytelling as well. I also love Davis's renditions of these characters, which have a distinctive look but remain recognizable as the characters that we know.
For all that the artwork and some of the ideas are strong, however, the dialogue and moment-to-moment writing is fairly weak. The dialogue reads like something no one on Earth would actually say, but it lacks the stylistic flair of a Joss Whedon or Brian Bendis, whose similarly unreal dialogue is forgivable because of how entertaining it is. There's a lot of nonsense dialogue flying about, words that add nothing to the story or to the characters, and it just keeps the reader at a distance, keeping them from getting into the story. It also seems pretty clear that Claremont should be banned from using thought balloons, because in trying to get us into the characters' heads, he has them acting like players in a bad '50s romance melodrama.
There's also a fair amount going on here, and in Claremont's hands, that tends to mean that one or more of these subplots will go unresolved for years or just disappear entirely. A little more focus certainly wouldn't hurt the title. Creatively, I mean, because in business terms, the book is doing just fine, despite being pretty weak in general and downright anemic when compared to the same type of thing being done so much better in Astonishing X-Men. This one is for the X-Men diehards and Alan Davis fans only, which probably explains why it's in the top ten every month. 5/10
