My Review…Xmen- Endangered Species

Hi there.

First, let me say that over the years I have been an ” on again, off again ” X-Fan “…The constant mystery behind Logan’s origin, has at times been entertaining and at times either frustrating or just plain redundant…to the never ending battles with Magneto…the one main theme that has pretty much pervaded the X Men universe is this…these people are Mutants…individuals born with a gene that gives them ( in some cases ) extraordinary abilities…it also ( in every case ) has made them hated and shunned by a society that they always seem to help on one level or another…we have also been privey to tales that happen in the future, in the past, and also in space…we have pretty much seen these mutants in every situation imaginable….so what do you do to make a flagship title(s) interesting again to your readership ( and yes, I’m sure that there are a lot of you out there who have always found and still find the X Men titles worth the price of admission )well first…we drive a mutant crazy or mad if you like that term…which set up the ” House of M ” event, which at the end on what has been termed ” M Day ” one crazy ( or again MAD if you will ) mutant, namely Wanda Maximoff at the end of House, utters these words, in a whisper.. No More Mutants….and the world of the X Men is turned upside down…

After House of M, I did not follow the X titles very much, and I only read Wolverine when that title featured the always entertaining battle between Logan and Sabertooth, and after that ended, I stopped reading…

And then, a few months ago, I was drawn again to the X Men because of the ” Endangered Species ” storyline that would actually be a sort of small insert ( well that’s my term anyway ) that would run through most, if not all the X titles.

Just so that we understand one another, I hate stories that run through several titles of a particular series of books, but I won’t get into that here, as I believe I have already made my disdain for this practice know in another post titled ” Why I Hate Crossover Stories “, but what I hate even more is a story that I have to chase, and doesn’t deliver the goods…like this one.

Endangered Species tells the tale of one Hank McCoy, aka the Beast. A brilliant scientist, who is trying to discover a way to save his species from extinction…a noble cause, and we the reader, are taken through the trials and tribulations that McCoy goes through in this endeavour. During this story we see Hank try to enlist the aid of anyone who might have something to gain or who might have something to lose should there be ” No More Mutants “.

There are several clues as to the final outcome of this story, which comes from Hank’s appealing to the High Evolutionary to his forming what would be a very short lived alliance with the ” Dark Beast “, a Hank McCoy from another timeline… but, for me, in the end, there was really nothing here that was new, nothing that we as real people have not actually experienced in the real world, and so this is not a revolutionary story, and there is certainly nothing here that was worth, first the actual chasing through several X titles to read this tale, nor was the compiled story into a trade edition worth the price of admission…I can only hope that what is to be the final tale of this mutant extinction called “ Messiah Complex “, which I actually went through the trouble to collect, through all of the X titles, will be worth my hard earned dollars, because Endangered Species certainly was not.

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