Uncanny X-Men #512 Review

Writer: Matt Fraction

Artist: Yanick Paquette

To get the ball rolling, I adore this cover. Yanick Paquette is my kind of artist and I happen to enjoy his work a lot. Now, I have heard quite a few people dislike him and I understand this considering Young X-Men's limited palette of yellow, orange, black and brown or so it appeared. and then the Uncanny Annual cover looked like crap. But generally, I find Paquette does an amazing job and I advise you to ignore the naysayers since they seem to also like the childish and repetitive works of Dodson.

The format for this review is going to be different. Even though I've been summarizing things more and more lately, this time I advise you either read the issue or look up a summary because 45 pages to summarize is too much for me. This time I'm going to comment on a couple things and I noticed and then give an overall opinion. Basically, a shorter entry.

Something that I will never get over is how many times I have to read M-Day explained. This time around it was just the first two panels of the first page, but it was two panels too many after Astonishing and Uncanny double-teaming to explain it every issue it seems. Why not include the entire idea of the X-Men? "The X-Men were originally founded under the ideas of Charles Xavier who dreamed of peaceful coexistence..."

Another annoyance is Fraction's Craptions. From now on I'm going to include the worst few of the bunch as a special part of my post. Here's this issue's:

Now, the X-Club thus far in Uncanny has mostly served to bore and annoy most of the readers I've been around. Luckily, the addition of Elizabeth, Psylocke, is absolutely what the team needs. Plus, I LOVED Paquette's Psylocke in Ultimate X-Men and I'm hoping he gets the artist position on the upcoming Psylocke mini-series. (That may suck since apparently one of the reasons why she's a good character is that she's sexy. How the hell? I'm sure people'd flip their shit if a female writer used sexy as one of the reasons why a guy hero's a good character.) Just so everyone knows, while Emma is my #1 X-Man, Psylocke happens to be my second favorite.

Wonderful news! Betsy's psychic again! Not fully, but still. Also, how many fucking ...'s are needed here? Must've taken forever for her to get those lines out.

And then Beast explains the reason why he asked about her powers is that he stands out and he doesn't want to be bothered by:

A little bit too dramatic egh?
Yanick dear did not seem to understand the depressed face might be overdoing it.

Or maybe it was Fraction's fault. Whatevs.

The team travels back in time and we get a group shot of joy. Particularly joyous because Psylocke looks stunning in that outfit:

Bets is so gorgeous!

At one point the seers see the science team coming and I found this panel a bit haunting:

Another underlying thing going on within this issue seems to be the possible re-pairing of Betsy and Warren who teamed up together often. I found this a bit weird though:

Warren, the woman can fly!
She doesn't even need to flap, she just thinks about it.
And one last panel of joy before the overall recap:

Oh Betsy, I love you.
By the way, I hope Fraction realizes that that's a psychic knife and not her TK katana.
Plus, she probably shouldn't be shoving a sword that's supposed to be like a real one in people's heads. Unless she wants to join X-Force.

Now for the overall.
This issue was a rare one that was not hindered by the atrocious works of Dodson or Land. Even better is that Fraction's story was wonderful, I got so caught up in it that for once I wasn't also reading it critically. I suggest everyone pick this story up since finally the science team does something useful and it's just a genuinely entertaining story. That's all, see you next issue (next week!).