Written by: Matthew Rosenberg, Kelly Thompson, & Ed Brisson
Art by: R.B. Silva, Adriano Di Benedetto, Rachelle Rosenberg, VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 2, 2019

The weekly Uncanny X-Men series feels like it should be a big deal but up to this point so far has come up rather small.  I for one just find myself personally growing tired of revisiting the X-Mens’ greatest hits here just for the sake of it.  Don’t get me wrong I’m all for a nostalgic trip done right, but nothing in this series so far has meshed well, from characterization to the story beats presented.   So lets get into eight here and hope that all magically improves.

This issue begins where we left off last issue, as Armor decides go through with changing her mind,  as she now tries to murder a currently de-powered X-Man, seeing this as the only way to save mutant kind.  Meanwhile on Earth the X-Men are still battling the remaining ‘Horsemen’ and really not accomplishing much progress.  Actually at this point in the story I find the events going on in the Age of Apocalypse timeline more interesting, but it all quickly ends later this issue pretty abruptly, also taking the little enjoyment I was getting with it.

The fighting continues on for most of this issue, but the main point to take out of it all is with X-Man now gone Apocalypse, Kitty, and the Senator all reemerge from rubble, but only to push things further over the edge really. Among the chaos Jean and Psylocke eventually break through to Legion, after screaming for pages they couldn’t do it, discovering where the ‘kids’ went, and Bishop goes in to bring everyone back.  All this brings me to my next nitpick, the physic attacks in this series have also become super repetitive, and an exercise in how to do comic book filler. A character just simply is not being able to do something for pages on end, until they suddenly are for really no reason at all, making these scenes a chore to read through at points … like here.

When Bishop arrives in the AoA things take a turn for the worse quickly because it all ticks off Legion, who I guess by revealing himself to X-Man powers Nate back up, and just when I thought we had a good thing going with Nate Gray out of the picture for a bit.  The issue ends on a so-so cliffhanger with everyone on Earth and what appears to be a combination of X-Man and Legion together as one individual, which cant be good, but also only means more mindscape craziness is going to happen, and I’ve just had enough of that at this point.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, while I’m not the biggest X-Men (or X-Man) fan out there, I cant imagine this is what true X-Men fans wanted when they heard Uncanny X-Men was coming back.  While R.B. Silva and crew do a great job at keeping up their end of the bargain on art duties, I think the combination of three writers on one story has led to a bland generic connect the dots X-Men story that I didn’t anticipate this early in the titles reemergence, and frankly just continues to be not that exciting.

5.0/10