With the inevitable New Mutants crossover looming, Kieron Gillen needs to do a lot in a short amount of time. With finally getting the reigns to do an original story, I have enjoyed the title more so the past couple of issues. This story has given Gillen to show his chops as a writer and uses very minor characters (in today’s age anyways) to make a compelling situation. While this story has been good the last two months, for me it kind of stalls with this particular issue.

Overall this part of the story isn’t bad, it just feels like a lot to read for a conclusion you can see coming. The narration boxes have been a slight sore spot in this run and Gillen has even poked fun of it a few times. Here though, he goes full out on the narration boxes and I gotta admit it bored me a bit. There’s some nice jokes peppered throughout, especially the Ms. Marvel segment, but as a reader I just didn’t see the need to clutter the story with this. I understand the meaning of them because Ikol spells it out but Gillen could have done it in a less then ham-fisted way. Also, the ending feels a bit of a cop out in that Gillen furthers the story with a ridiculous notion. It’s like he knows he needed Nightmare to get in a stronger position before the end but the way he does it here feels kind of lazy.

Like last month, I’ll mention that Richard Elson is doing his best work on this arc. The action is very good and when the script calls for, lets say, fireballs (which Daimon screams a lot in the beginning) it looks really good. In fact when the script calls for the more outlandish moments it looks really good, but when it’s just talking heads you see some of his shortcomings. People have had a hard time to make Loki look like a kid but Elson really makes it look like he’s a senior at points. In general the faces look pretty stiff and their reactions feels very one-dimensional. At least Jessica Kholinne’s colors make the issue stand out even if with of the flaws that are presented.

This is probably the weakest issue to date for this current storyline. That doesn’t make it a bad issue, it just wasn’t as strong as I felt it could be. The story rushed to an obvious conclusion and the narration boxes became a chore to read. Richard Elson’s art is still his best right now but you could still see some issues when it comes to the character models. I’m still excited to read an original story for this title; but I am starting to see a break from this series is necessary once the crossover ‘event’ starts.