Man, I saw that someone had given this comic a 1 rating as soon as comics were able to be rated, and assumed it was someone just being a jerk.

Maybe they weren’t.

I don’t know if someone ghost wrote issues five and six for Claremont, or whether he had some sort of stroke that enabled him to up his game, but the old Claremont is back.  This is the guy who killed the Exiles franchise.  The story is written not like the 1990 era comics it was birthed from but the early 80s Claremont X-Men.  The “all mutants are going to die” storyline that made the previous issues so good is never mentioned, but it connects pretty heavily to the first couple of issues.

I’m still going to flip through future issues to see if Claremont has any more surprise kung-fu left.  But I’m no longer convinced that the first four issues were an elaborate joke to set us up for the sucker punch brilliance (comparative brilliance, anyway) of issues five and six.