X-Tinction Agenda

 X-Men: X-Tinction Agenda by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, Jon Bogdanove, John Caponigro, Jim Lee, Rick Leonardi, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Guang Yap, and others, 316 pages

The X-Men are not dead.  This seemingly unremarkable fact comes as a considerable surprise to some of their closest friends, including their old teammates in X-Factor and their former charges in the New Mutants, who, along with the rest of the world, believed they had been killed battling the Adversary in Dallas.  Life means they must continue to evolve - their leader, Storm, is trapped in the body of a child, the Cajun thief Gambit has joined the team, and the New Mutants are now led by the mysterious man known only as Cable.  

They will not have the leisure to work these issues out.  The apartheid state of Genosha, where mutants are genetically indoctrinated into becoming servants of the human population, launches an audacious raid against the X-Mansion, kidnapping a handful of young mutants.  As the American government and the international community consider their responses to this attack on US soil, the X-Men make their own assault on the island nation, little suspecting that the Genoshan forces are led by a brainwashed Havok, Cyclops' younger brother.  Worse, the entire crisis is being orchestrated by Cameron Hodge, Angel's former friend and business manager, who used the Worthington fortune to bankroll an anti-mutant militia and was ultimately responsible for the amputation of Angel's wings.  Now equipped with a monstrous cyborg body as hideous as his twisted soul, Hodge has manipulated the Genoshan government into open war with the X-Men, a war only one side can survive...

Despite being a crossover "event", X-Tinction Agenda feels much less like an interruption of ongoing storylines than most of the species, and this may, in fact, be part of the reason it is not as well-remembered as it deserves to be.  The strong continuity is no doubt largely due to the strength of the storytelling partnership between Claremont and Simonson.  Unfortunately, the art is a different story.  Lee's work is consistently excellent, but Bogdanove's is uneven and Liefeld proves here that his much-maligned later work was actually an improvement.  The trade paperback also includes the three issue arc which introduced Genosha, a serviceable story centered on Rogue with little hint of the many transformations the fictional nation would undergo in the ensuing decades.