Marvel really loves this new mini-anthology format, because they keep putting them out, the X-Men office especially. This is the first part of a four-part mini with an interesting structure; each issue has three eight-page stories, the first of which is a running throughline (a story by Mike Carey and Michael Ryan about Iceman), the other two of which will be oneshots unique to each issue. It’s an interesting approach, providing both a serialized narrative (that even appears to be eventful!) and standalone stories. So, how do they stack up?

First story (Mike Carey/Michael Ryan/Victor Olazaba/Chris Sotomayor)

This is the most eventful and tied-in of the stories here, written by current X-architect Mike Carey and picking up plot points from character work he was doing with Iceman before Messiah CompleX way way back in the “Blinded by the Light” arc from #200-204. Michael Ryan, coming off of Joss Whedon’s “run” on Runaways, does strong character-based art here; Carey, as well, slips into writing Bobby Drake again like a comfortable pair of slippers. I can’t imagine the story would hold much interest to new readers, but to X-fans who’ve been itching for a chance to see Carey write some of the mainline X-Men again (without Skrulls), this really recaptures a lot of the odd marriage of unpredictability and logic that made Carey’s X-Men run so popular. If Manifest Destiny were a oneshot about Iceman (assuming parts 2-4 don’t blow it), I’d give it a solid thumbs-up and get on with my day. But…

Second story (James Asmus/Chris Burnham/Nathan Fairbairn)

This is interesting – bringing Tabitha Smith back into the X-fold, attempting to amalgamate her incarnations from X-Force and Nextwave into a single view of the character. Unlike with Machine Man (which required a series of deconstructions courtesy of Ivan Brandon in Marvel Comics Presents), Tabitha Smith thankfully wasn’t all that complicated or nuanced of a character in the first place, so this isn’t all that difficult of a job. It’s a cute story, and I don’t mean that in a dismissive sense; it’s a standard eight-pager by an unknown writer, and it’s overall rather inconsequential and (again, I mean this in a non-condescending way) trivial, but it’s pretty good at what it does, has some enjoyable moments, at least tries to be original, has some quite nice art and, well, it made me smile. Not bad.

Third story (C.B. Cebulski/David Yardin/John Rauch & Nathan Fairbairn)

This, on the other hand – I have a lot of respect for Mr. Cebulski as an industry figure and as a talent scout, and from all reports he’s a very capable editor. However, this eight-page story is just awful, trite and pointless. I’m a relative newcomer to some of the vagaries of the X-franchise – I followed it in the ’90s for a little bit, but jumped out of comics when I couldn’t really afford it, and didn’t return until shortly before House of M. I have little to no familiarity with many of the old New Mutants characters, especially Moonstar and Karma. Since Karma was recently introduced into the plot of Uncanny, however, I was curious to see who she was and what she was all about. It didn’t help that it took me about two or three pages to figure out that this character was Karma, a problem that would have been easily solved (at least in my case) by having her referred to as Xi’an instead of Shan – you know, the name they used in Uncanny – or having her referred to as “Karma” somewhere, anywhere, in the eight full pages of this story. I understand this is a bit nitpicky to start off with, but this is an anthology title meant to, at least in part, introduce newer readers to some of the cobwebs in the X-Men’s past. If I wasn’t aware I was supposed to expect a Karma story, I likely would have figured this was about someone I *really* didn’t know named Shan. This is, again, a fairly small argument in comparison to the main one, though – this story manages to combine the worst excesses of Frank Miller’s monologue masturbation and Claremont’s verbose “tell, don’t show” style, with a spicing of awful uses of foreign terms (“She can kiss MA PETITE DERRIERE!”). The entire story rotates on a thematic axis of control – get it? Karma can control other people but not herself – the layers around which are so transparent this practically could have been an essay rather than a story. It’s not interesting, it’s not charming, and by the end of it I went from being mildly curious about to borderline disliking the main character – not to mention the costarring children, who come off as those sort of obnoxious saucer-eyed idiots who can’t conceptualize of death and loss like extras on a Nickelodeon show. A disaster.