Uncannny X-Men #500

One-sentence summary: A daringly different direction (it's issue 500, I get to write like Stan Lee for a sentence) for the X-Men that it'll be interesting to see through.

The X-Men titles have, for quite some time, been stuck in a rut that not even the best writers have really been able to help with. Sometimes the rut has produced good stories, sure, but there have been few X-Men stories in recent years that couldn't have been from ten, twenty, even thirty years ago.

That being said, this issue really makes the reader feel as if we're on the cusp of a big change. The move to San Francisco is a really good choice, in my mind; the location makes sense and it's nice to change scenery once every few decades. Also, I really liked the idea of a shock artist using real Sentinels as a piece of art -- it really is a fairly accurate, Marvel version of shock art. Bringing back major villains is an attention-grabber too, which I'm looking forward to, and the change of the X-Men from exclusive team to open embassy (ironically similar to Genosha) is interesting. The writing style for the team, as a whole, seems much fresher than it has in quite some time, and is a major contributor to that feeling of change this issue just oozes.

That said, there's some bad stuff that's not insignificant. For one, part of what makes the X-Men who they are is that the team should experience change w/in the members. So, why is everyone (Emma Frost excepted, though she's written here as a slightly naughtier Jean Grey) on the team from at least 30 years ago? In addition to that, the green-ness of the book got on my nerve. I'm not this monstrous tree-burner, but it was pretty irritating in this issue. I was fine until they throw a car and the line "Did it have to be a hybrid?" was said...ugh. We got it during the two pages about it earlier, it doesn't have to be stressed that much.

Brubaker and Ellis seem to be dragging the X-Men out of their rut. Whether they'll do a good job with that or not remains to be seen, but as they're two of my favorite writers, I'm optimistic.