tl;dr it was good.

I’m glad this issue is doing more to highlight Beast, Iceman and Angel. I had an overall feeling from earlier issues that they weren’t really explored enough.

Scene with Danger training Iceman made me think of Dragon Ball Z training episodes for some reason.

I noticed the rings on Lorna’s costume are gold, which is a nice touch for variation of color scheme.

The scenes between Lorna and Magneto are really good in this issue. Their personal history and family ties are used, but Lorna is still very distinctly her own character. It’s mostly got the right balance.

I especially like the emphasis on Lorna being there to challenge and work with her father toward a common good goal, and how it’s explicitly stated that Magneto doesn’t want blind followers. The exact way that message came out is perfect. The in-comics framing is about Magneto not wanting the young O5 that way, but it applies to Lorna just as well without the risk of coming off condescending to her age and experience.

It’s at this point I want to say: if anything in this issue was adjusted based on criticism and complaints, Bunn is much quicker and more open than Peter David was. That’s a very good sign both for him writing Lorna and for the book in general.

That said, there were a couple spots that irked me. They’re minor, but I feel I should say them anyway.

The first is entirely personal, selfish and as I said, very minor. We see Magneto use his powers to serve more coffee to Lorna. I would’ve preferred seeing Lorna do it. But, it actually makes a lot more story sense for Magneto to do it since he’s the host – and again, it’s minor.

The other means a little more.

Lorna acting surprised and saying “some sort of attack?” to the unexpected attack, and Magneto “correcting” her. Lorna’s among the very last people I would expect to be surprised by an attack. She survived Genosha, a genocide that came on sudden, unexpected and killed millions in minutes, within a mutant homeland where she no doubt felt safer than ever. She was traumatized deeply by that. Survivors don’t act like they can’t believe an attack happened. If they’ve been through what Lorna has, it’s hard not to expect you could die at any moment.

A survivor’s struggle is managing to relax and feel safe, and that problem sticks with you. You may lose some of that edge, but it never goes away. It’s the whole concept of a veteran’s PTSD triggering because they saw images of war or heard a sound like a gunshot. A survivor is more likely to assume something harmless and innocent is an attack than they are to mistake an attack for something harmless. When you add things like Lorna fighting in the War of Kings, and getting abducted in her sleep by Iceman’s dark alter ego in Liu’s run, there’s even more to go on.

I know that’s a lot of text, and having a lot of text makes it look like a huge problem, but in this case, it’s not. It was a couple lines on one panel in an issue that was otherwise great to her.

This is just one of those things I really, really feel the need to expound upon. Depiction of the way people who’ve been through trauma live it out is a pretty big deal to me.

Back to other praise though.

Scott and Jean being in each other’s heads is a really interesting idea with a lot of potential. There’s a risk of it looking hokey and bland if it’s treated like a romantic genre film story, but I’m not getting that vibe so far. What I’m getting out of it is more like two random people forced to live like twins in the same mind but different bodies. Sort of like a mad science experiment.

Lastly, I like the parallel of Beast becoming THE Beast, as in playing on Revelations. Maybe a different writer pre-Bunn intended this all along, but pulling it in here really makes Hank using magic feel like it actually fits now. Before, it looked like a superficial add-on just to be able to claim having the young O5 around has worth.

That’s all I’ve got here.