Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: “When is not: Riot at Xavier’s Part Twoâ€
Quick Rating: Five hot pokers up Grant Morrison’s butt for not having the grapefruits to have Scott and Emma legally commit adultery and five shots of Vodka for Grant having Quentin beat the brains out of Xavier.
Written by: Grant Morrison
Penciled by: Frank Quitely and Avalon Studios
Inked by: N/A
Colored by: Chris Chuckry
Lettered by: Richard Starkings and Wes
Editor: Mike Marts
Publisher: Marvel
N/A: Information not available in credits
Synopsis: As Xorn’s special needs kids beat a roaming gang of U-Men, Emma Frost and Scott Summer’s psychic affair is finally confirmed. The Omega Gang gets the drop on Professor Xavier and holds him hostage, ruining the much hyped and carefully planned “Open Day†event by making a public proclamation calling for the death of all humans.
Notes From the Peanut Gallery:
· Don’t Tell Anyone Part 1: After beating around the bush for nearly two years, Grant Morrison finally confirms that Emma and Cyclops are having an affair. Sort of. Having their sex sessions take place on the astral plane takes away from the adultery by allowing Scott to still legally be loyal to Jean, which is a big cop-out. Most X-Men fans accept the idea that Cyclops isn’t Mister Fidelity considering the nasty business of him abandoning his wife Madelyn and son Nathan to go run around with Jean Grey. So why not go all out with Scott doing the horizontal mambo with the White Queen in the flesh?
· The Short Bus Gang Saves the Day: The bulk of this issue focuses on the remedial class and their dealing with their first encounter with a group of villains in the form of the U-Men. Most of the time however was spent on the team bickering between themselves over how they weren’t ready which got annoying real quickly. At least Beak and Trailer Park Angel (the only two who have actually had any combat experience) took the lead instead of just sitting around doing nothing.
· Don’t Tell Anyone Part 2: Xorn and Trailer Park Angel bond a little when Trailer Park Angel catches Xorn killing off the U-Men inside the group’s Ambulance and Xorn asks Trailer Park Angel to keep silent about his killing of the villains. Should be interesting to see if Grant follows up on this anytime soon or if it goes into the file as yet another dangling storylines that never gets resolved.
· The Warren Ellis Forum Lives On: Remedial class member Dummy’s containment suit is referred to as a “pervert suit†this issue. “Pervert Suitâ€, a term coined by Warren Ellis on his now defunct Delphi Forum to describe most super-hero costumes and quickly became adopted as jargon by most of posters at the site and was later adopted as a negative term used to describe any and all mainstream super-hero characters.
· Let’s Get Ready To RUMBLE!!!: After building Quentin and his gang up in the last couple of issues, Morrison finally springs into motion the much hyped X-Men versus Omega Gang confrontation. And while having Quentin, quite literally, neutralizing Xavier in a matter of seconds was done well, the Omega Gang’s spoiling of the much-hyped “Open Day†event was extremely anti-climatic to say the least. I mean, dropping a banner from the main office, calling out for mutants to rise up and kill humans? How anti-climactic is that, given we’ve had the Stepford Cuckoos warning everyone that Quentin was going to do something to ruin everything. And in the end, all he does is throw out a clichéd anti-human speech?
