Every single time I fall for it again!

The X-Men are having an event and guess what…there are going to be 8 books that have nothing to do with it and are going to be 66.67% about characters you don’t care about.

Let’s start with the first story: Bobby Drake and some chick….or is she? This was the only part of the first Manifest Destiny installment that was worth reading at all. Good story, good twist, good use of Hank McCoy, good cliffhanger. I actually care about this story because its one of the origional X-Men, it was well done and it will probably be resolved in one of the big two X-Books (Uncanny, X-Men).

The next two stories are sub-par. Who honestly cares about Boom-Boom or Shan? I don’t. That is for certain. I haven’t even seen these two characters (to my amusement) since…I don’t really recall when, that’s how little they mean to me.

Boom Boom’s story is uninspired and immature. She tries to research a new villian on “FaceSpace.” I wonder where they got that name from. I mean really, that’s about as creative as Marvel’s newest straight to DVD, Next Avengers. I literally feel sorry for the Beast in this story, until I realized that James Asmus wasn’t writing the actual Beast, but a dumbed-down version that tried too hard to fit the tone of the story. And what is up with his eyes bugging out of his head?!? He’s the Beast, not the Cheshire cat.

The lead character is accessable and consumable as yet another incarnation of the 16-year old girl X-Man. (For my money, no X-woman will ever live up to Kitty. ’Nuff said. And yes, I know that Boom Boom has got to be way older than that, but she doesn’t exactly act like it.) 

All I really have to say, actually it’s all I want to say about the story with Shan is that she looks like John Cassaday’s Cassandra Nova, and that she might be arrested for child abuse.

This whole mini-story tie-in nonsense started with Generation-M and has got to stop. The only reason I bought its predecessors is that they killed off one of my favorite, and under-used, X-Men, Chamber and I’ve been hoping that they will bring him back. Though I’ve since lost those hopes.

My predictions of the next three issues of Manifest Destiny: 14-16 pages of good stuff, 34-38 pages of crap. And yet, I’ll probably keep buying it. So I don’t know who I’m more angry at.