There has been much speculation in the iFanboyverse on what type of goods that Dark X-Men: The Confession would deliver. Most were under the impression that this would be a pointless gab-fest between Cyclops and Emma Frost, being that we know that they are peachy with each other again by the end of the recent Utopia crossover. I, however, set the bar a little higher for my expectations. It was known that this would be the issue where the couple's dirty laundry will finally be exposed, Cyke's being that he's been running a wetworks kill squad and Emma's being that she was summoned by Osborne to be on his Cabal. I was under the impression that the issue would deal with the emotional responces of both characters upon hearing these jaw dropping revelations. But that's not what we got. We just got a recap issue. A very fancilied dressed up recap issue. For 4 bucks.

The biggest fault of this issue was that more time is devoted to the actual confessing than the aftermath of the confessing. A little more than half the book is just artist Bing Cansino re-rendering recent past events and captions explaining what was going on at the time. I would be fine with this if this was a #0 issue or something which was marketed specifically for catching up new readers to the current story, but that's not what we were promised or sold.

Slapping on the title "The Confession" harkens readers back to Civil War: The Confession, which in one issue provided more emotion and character moments than every issue of the core event combined. So naturally, readers would be on the money to assume that something with the same title has at least something a little in common in terms of emotional impact. If you think that's a bit far fetched, take a look at the solicits to this issue. It says "Emma Frost's secret dealings with the Cabal come to light and her life will never be the same." Well allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to fill you in when Emma's and Cyclops' secret dealings came to light: NOTHING! After the lengthy recap pages detailing each others secret dealings, Scott and Emma pretty much shrug their shoulders and say "I'm cool with it if you're cool with it." I mean if I found out that my loved one was running a secret kill squad, I would definitely be pretty shocked and horrified. No real emotional reactions here, folks. Just recaping.

I don't want to blame Chris Yost and Craig Kyle too much for this poor issue since it had "Editorially Mandated" blatently written through the whole thing, but I have to since the execution could have been so much better. I'm sure that writers of their caliber could have worked the script a little better to include both recaping of events and emotional reactions to further the story (Invincible #0 is a great example of this), but this issue was just a lazy and half assed way to tie up a hanging plot thread.