Ask anyone who’s ever met any of my exes, and they’ll tell you that the things I love are imperfect.  People, food, comic books.

While it’s entirely too early in the run to profess any sort of love for this X-23 run, but I’ve liked most of her mini-series, and I’m optimistic about her having an ongoing title.

Liu’s story is good to great, depending on the sort of headspace you’re in when you read it.  I tend not to like comics that are too psychology based, but this one worked for me.  A lot of introspection by Laura, mirrored by Storm, Emma, Wolverine, and a bunch of Academy X/Young X-Men weighing in on how X-23 has adjusted to her post X-Force life.  I think if you’ve enjoyed Laura as a character, you’ll like this issue.  There’s not a lot of action, but I’m sure that will be dealt with in the next issue or two.

The problem with this issue is the art.  And I think it’s mainly the colorist.  The colors are so muted that I can’t tell if there are issues with inconsistent anatomy, or if it’s an issue of bad shadowing.  There’s a fuzzy effect, like someone vaselined the lens on several of the pages, and it looks awful.  There are also some major negative space issues.  Sometimes a character is well defined and separated from the background, and sometimes the look like they’re all doing a Kitty Pride phasing impersonation.  And light simply doesn’t work the way it’s used in this book.  At all.

I’d be really interested in seeing the pencils for this issue because the coloring is so awful, I honestly can’t tell whether the pencils are any good.  The panel layout is great, and there are no storytelling issues.  In fact, it took me a while to pinpoint why I didn’t like the art.  When I got to the first page where the characters looked like they were Colorformed into the background, I thought they’d switched artists.

I really hope they fix the color problem for the next issue or else I feel this comic could suffer from X-Factor syndrome, where the god-awful art gets people to drop a perfectly good story.