A truly Astonishing X-Men 32

Astonishing X Men issue 32 by Warren Ellis and Phil Jimenez. Now while I am the first one to role his eyes every time Warren Ellis starts to write in the superhero genre then place bets on when he's going to 'walk away from superhero comics for good' again I'm also the first one to say he's bloody good at it (along with he should really think before he opens his face located noise producer). And low he decides to bless the X Universe with his well researched futurist views and witty banter, even if that witty banter seems to be painted in a very similar color of bile with only subtly different flavors of carroty lumps. This isn't the first time with the X-Verse as he took a collection of mutants (including my favourite Nightcrawler) and went off to play in his own private sandbox in the corner of the Marvel Universe with Excalibur and bloody wonderful it was to.

Now that Phil Jimenez has sorted himself out with the little things, like pacing and coherent page layouts the comic would be coming on in leaps and bounds if they could be arsed getting it out on schedule. Only All Star Batman and Robin (here after referred to as that Frank Millers festival of wankery or ASBAR) has a release record worse than this. But this issue demonstrates a problem comics seem more and more determined not to fix, that's the one of lazy writing. Yes we get some nice lines coming from Wolverine about how manly Cyclops is that don't actually sound homo erotic and the story is paced beautifully leaving you hanging with the villains Magoffin without actually revealing who the villain is making you slack jawed for more next issue BUT!

There's a scene were Beast and his beau are pulling a 200 foot tall zombie sentinel (here after referred to as zombinel) that fires brood soldiers from its fingers, out to sea by its face using grappling hooks fired from the X Jet. So far so good, but when aforementioned beau (who frankly doesn't intrigue me enough to drag my arse back into my long box and dig out her name) asks if there are any weapons on board Beast replies with a 'no but we have science!' So I braced myself for the trick Warren Ellis was going to pull off as the tension mounted and the zombinel starts pulling back and the X Jet starts breaking and knuckles get whiter and... Beast launches some missiles into its face. Now when I saw them I thought 'ooohhh what are they going to do?' basing this thought with total justification on the previous statement 'There are no weapons on this X Jet'. Are they going to turn out to be H Bombs where the 'H' stands for 'Hugs' thus confusing zombinel while Cyclops gives it a laser vision enema? No, they go into the zombinels face and explode. No weapons. But they do have face explody missiles apparently, which granted are scientific but hardly the bit of genius writing I held onto my pants for. This is what I hope to be a simple annoying quibble as the series ploughs on this issue is a great setup with all the right ingredients for chocolate gateau of mutant wonderment. I just hope Warren Ellis doesn't replace too many cherries with cat turds.