The Secret X-Men
Sunspot and Cannonball gather a team of X-Men for a secret mission in The Secret X-Men, by writer Tini Howard, artist Francesco-Mobili, colorist Jesus Aburtov, and letterer Clayton Cowles. This comic is kind of baffling in that while it's a fun read at times, nothing really happens in it.
At a festival on Chandrilar, Deathbird comes to Sunspot and tells him that Imperial Guard precogs have predicted a threat to Xandra, and he needs to bring a team of X-Men to help her. He goes to Cannonball to talk to him about it and presents him with their X-Men team- the mutants who weren't voted onto the X-Men during the Hellfire Gala. The Imperial Guard shows up and asks them for help in finding Xandra. The team leaves Chandrilar, encounters Sidri bounty hunters, and fights them off. They find their way to the location, eventually locating a secret door that leads to a Krakoan gate. They find Xandra and company, only for the Sidri to attack again, taking Deathbird away. The X-Men are unable to save her, and Xandra and the precogs decide to wipe their minds of the whole thing, so they won't remember what happened because knowledge of the loss of Deathbird might endanger her.
Tini Howard's work can be hit or miss, which fits this book in a nutshell. The team is a great line-up, and Sunspot and Cannonball are always fun to read about. There's a lot of entertaining interplay between the characters, even though Howard doesn't do a good job of characterizing some of them. That's pretty much all the good to be found in this book because the plot itself feels like it doesn't matter at all.
Danger to Xandra has been a repeating motif in the Krakoa era, and this is yet another book that plays into that, but the problem is that Howard never really reveals the danger or why Deathbird needed the X-Men. Was the danger just Deathbird being taken by the Sidri? Doesn't that mean the whole thing happened because of the precogs warning, and they knew that would happen that way? There's a part in the book where they talk about not changing what they see, but the whole plotline feels weird. Honestly, the book feels like an excuse just to use the mutants who weren't voted on the team, which is fine, but using them in this story is kind of useless. This will probably play into X-Men Red at some point, but that doesn't make this story any better.
Luckily, the art is pretty good. Francesco-Mobili does a great job with art. While the characters don't get very much interesting to do in the books, they look amazing, and the X-Men costumes are a cool design. Aburtov's coloring is the icing on the cake, making the art really pop.
The Secret X-Men feels like a waste of time. Howard writes some entertaining interplay between the characters, but the plot is barely even worthy of being called that. Even if it plays into something in the future, there's really not much reason to actually buy the comic. Francesco-Mobili and Aburtov are a great art team, but it's not enough to make this book worthwhile.
