Uncanny X-Men #477


Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Clayton Henry
Inker: Mark Morales
Colorist: Wil Quintana
Letterer: Chris Eliopoulos

This is the third issue in the twelve-part story arc “The Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire”. The first two issues have shown us that the long lost Summers’ brother Vulcan has left Earth and is heading towards Shi’ar space. He kills everything in his path and will certainly destroy the Shi’ar Empire once he arrives. Professor X has gathered a team of X-Men to go into space and stop Vulcan. In this issue, we take a break from watching the pursuing X-men team and are instead viewing Vulcan’s progress across space.

One of my favorite things about this issue is that I don’t feel left out. I’m not a huge X-Men follower and before I started reading this run of Uncanny X-Men, I hadn’t read an X-book for at least five years. However, they’ve consistently done an excellent job of keeping the story moving forward while still including enough information so that people like me can follow along. I knew very little about Vulcan, but this issue does a great job of getting you inside his head and understanding what makes him tick. While many readers still won’t agree with his methods, it becomes quite clear that Vulcan has a good reason to hate the Shi’ar people.

I was quite sad when I originally opened the issue and realized that Billy Tan wasn’t doing the art in this issue. Tan is one of my favorite comic book artists and his work on this book has been superb thus far. However, with its quick release schedule, it’s understandable that he’d need to have someone help out on some of the issues. Clayton Henry is more than capable. I’m not familiar with him, but he is a great choice to fill in on this particular issue. He does an incredible job with the cosmic setting and all the ships, planets, and comets that populate it. Ed Brubaker is right at home on this book. He seems to have a strong vision for where this story is going and it shows through in each issue.

Every time a new creative team comes on an X-Men book I get excited, because maybe that means I’ll finally be able to get into the X-Men. Time and time again I’ve found myself lost and/or disinterested. However, this run on Uncanny X-Men has been exactly what I was looking for. I highly recommend that you run out and find the first two issues and pick up this issue when it hits stands this coming Wednesday.
 

Special thanks go out to Jeremy Shorr, owner of Titan Comics for allowing us to use his advance preview books for review purposes.
 

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