Astonishing X-Men #5 Review

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Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: NA

Written by: Joss Whedon
Penciled by: John Cassaday
Inked by: NA
Colored by: Laura Martin
Lettered by: Chris Eliopoulos
Editor: Mike Marts
Publisher: Marvel Comics

THE SKINNY
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The X-Men make their final stand against Ord while Colossus reveals that he did indeed die, but woke up in a lab where he was tortured and experimented on by Ord before being rescued by Shadowcat. Oh and Scott gets on the head and has a dream where he dresses up in one of Cable’s costumes (complete with Action Tutu and Mullet of DOOM!) and asks an apathetic Dark Phoenix if she likes it.

VIVISECTION
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Colossus is back. After dying a perfect death (unlike Hawkeye, who’s death in the most recent issue of Avengers was pointless and pathetically carried out) Peter has been resurrected and returned to the pages of the Astonishing X-Men. It’s pretty obvious where Joss Whedon is going with this in that he’s trying to set Kitty Pryde and Colossus up as his analogues for Angel and Buffy, right down to Peter being tortured by a scary demon dude ala Angel.

One slight problem: There are a thousand more interesting things to do with Kitty than rehash the Kitty/Peter relationship.Seriously, if all Joss can do to towards writing for Kitty is to hook her up with Peter again, then he should ship the character over to Uncanny X-Men and let Chris Claremont use her. Plus Angel/Buffy were a crappy couple with ZERO chemistry (there I said it!) So why rehash that?

That being said, I have to give John Cassaday props for the great artwork in this issue. In particular, the entire scene where the X-Men find out Colossus is alive. The artwork (complete with the bug-eyed “Holy $h!t” look everyone takes on when they first see Colossus) was just great and made me see what everyone’s been talking about when they praised John’s work on Planetary all of these years.

The issue ends with a bit of a cliffhanger as Nick Fury shows up in the final page with an army of SHIELD agents and ominously announces that the X-Men are going to lose. Will Fury be a jerk and complicate things for the X-Men? Read next month’s issue!