There’s lots of sex in this story, from a variant cover that includes Rogue (who isn’t even in this story)…
…to Emma Frost being hot as hell.
While I’m sure that a comic consisting of nothing more than Emma dressing up in various outfits for Scott would sell like gangbusters, there actually is a story here. An avante garde artist uses three old sentinel robots as his new installation. At the opening, civilians come cosplaying as X-Men.
But one of them is the real thing…
He brings the sentinels to life, there’s a big fight, and then he gets all righteous.
If you’re wondering how he got his powers back, check out all the tech in that panel. He’s facking it. Although, if someone can create tech strong enough to fight all the X-Men, it makes you wonder how the mutants are still alive.
Anyway, Magneto escapes and we see that he’s teamed up with High Evolutionary and they’re living in outer space and doing something with a Celestial.
While that’s going on with the main team, Pixie is attacked by a group that calls itself the Hellfire Cult.
More about sex: The beat down of Pixie has been alleged as a sexual fetishization of violence by this guy, and others. It’s worth a read and a thought, but my site isn’t about the politics of comic storytelling.
Back to the action: The cult answers to the mutant Empath, who is using his empathic powers to hyperdrive their underlying fear of mutants. He answers to this chick…
…And they have a blatant and graphic BDSM relationship.
Pixie survives her attack and the team go after the Cult.
Empath is significantly upgraded in this story, and there’s no explanation given (yet) for how his powers got augmented.
Pixie ends up getting her revenge on Empath, beating the snot out of him before stabbing him with her soul dagger and apparently rendering him blind.
The Red Queen escapes, but the big reveal is that she is Madelyne Pryor.
I know I probably should understand how Pryor keeps coming back from the dead but I don’t. Big reveals of dead characters without explanation are hard to pull off, because as readers there’s really no way we should have known this because, again, Pryor is supposed to be dead. Reveals are more satisfying when, as we look back, we can see that the evidence was there all along.
Other than an underwhelming final act, though, this is a very well-written, fast-paced story.
It also brings Cannonballs back to the team.
English (US) · 