Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: The Draco: Part 5
Written by: Chuck Austen
Penciled by: Philip Tan
Inked by: NA
Colored by: Avalon Studios
Lettered by: Randy Gentile
Editor: Mike Marts
Publisher: Marvel Comics
The horrifically bad “The Draco†Storyline continues with the penultimate chapter.
Story Vivisection
The book begins with the evil nurse Annie under the table, vomiting after being forced to witness the genocide of the entire country of Genosha from the point of view of the woman she wronged. Polaris points out Annie’s sickliness while Xavier defends her and loses his credibility given the utterly low and despicable means Annie used to get Alex to choose her over Lorna. I mean, having your child rape the mind of a recovering coma patient is even lower than the clichéd “hypnosis rape scenario” comic writers love to fling around when they do rape stories. The Annie bashing is broken up by the arrival of a kid with what appears to be metal wires poking out the side of his neck, who informs the three that Carter is missing, as we cut back to the two main storylines of “The Draco.”
A-Plot: We cut back to Island of the Dead, where Husk, Jubilee, Havok, Carter, and Iceman’s head are being held in a prison hexed to prevent them from using their powers. While caressing Carter the way a child molester would molest his victim, Havok listens as Carter violates Bobby’s mind, and tells Havok how much Iceman despises him for stealing Lorna and for taking Annie from him after they made out. Ever the evil piece of sh#t, Carter forgets to mention the fact that it was Annie who was whoring herself out to Bobby on the eve of the aborted wedding, not Iceman. Which makes her not only a creepy stalker who has her kid mindf#ck her patients in order to make them love her, but a slut to boot. So, after telling Bobby’s head that he thinks he’s the one who’s being written horribly out-of-character in order to allow a no-talent writer to live out his fantasy of dumping his significant other for a whore in a nurse’s uniform, Havok orders his catamite to unzip his pants so he can piss on Iceman and regenerate Bobby’s body in the most humiliating way possible.
Meanwhile, Azreal is revealed to not be the devil, but instead an External from biblical times who got sent into dimensional exile by a bunch of mutants with wings like Angel’s. We also learn (along with a ton of nonsensical and contradictory ranting about Kurt’s powers) that Azreal was brought back to Earth years earlier by Nightcrawler’s foster mother, Margali Szardos, who became an ally and lover of Azreal. As Azreal states that the barrier locking him into his dimension has to be opened on both sides at the same time, Polaris, Xavier, and Annie arrive at the Island of the Dead, as Lorna uses her magneto powers to open the gateway, while using Abyss on the other side to open the portal on Kurt’s end.
B-Plot: Juggernaut accidentally drops a portion of Sam’s house onto Sam and his mom, after Sasquatch decides to charge Juggernaut, in order to “get payback” for Juggernaut showing that he cares more about Sam’s plight that Alpha Flight does….
Overall a really crappy issue that makes me want to hurl. Philip Tan’s artwork is the only really redeeming thing here and as it’s obvious that Austen doesn’t want to write about Kurt’s past and is simply half-assing it until the next arc where he can write about one of his favorites in the book, the Juggernaut. Austen’s been writing the book well over a year now and it’s pretty obvious now which characters he cares about and which ones he doesn’t and is going out of his way to FUBAR just because he can. Kurt seems to be one of the characters Chuck seems to like, as seen by the way that he immediately undid the bullsh#t Chris Claremont did to Nightcrawler during his abortion of a second run awhile back, and brought back the fun-loving rogue Nightcrawler of old. But this storyline is just trash that just makes me want to cry in terms of how Chuck is mangling the story of Kurt’s parentage, especially after Chuck pulled his head out of his ass with Uncanny X-Men #427 and wrote a good story about the events of Nightcrawler’s conception that made it appear like Chuck knew what he was doing with this arc.
