Mojo, the demented creature obsessed with melding deadly television shows with reality, has made Earth his focus and it’s going to take the combined might of two X-Men teams to fight back! But when threats from their past are thrown at them, how will these teams react? With Sentinels and Brood and Bad Memories attacking at every opportunity, will Kitty and Jean and their teams be able to save Manhattan? Or is this the trick that finally boosts Mojo’s ratings?

With numerous winks and nods, X-Men: Gold #13 launches in a way that’s fun but at the same time had me stopping to ask “huh?” and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. The Gold and Blue teams are together and getting along doing what the X-Men do best when they relax, play some baseball. But, things can never be calm and fun for the X-Men, Mojo’s plan is underway and it’s all about ratings (where’s the Donald Trump analogy!?).

The good here is it’s great to see the X-Men focused on some classic stuff in this issue where they face bad guys from their past, but we’ve generally seen that for the previous twelve issues where characters like the X-Cutioner have been brought out. So, out of all of Marvel’s comics, their X line is the one that generally doesn’t need a Marvel Legacy focus. But, somehow with this Legacy, things get more confusing, especially if you haven’t read the comics leading up to this. I missed X-Men Blue #12 and suddenly Bloodstorm is an X-Man!? What? I have no idea how someone diving into this will think. There’s a lot packed in. You have Old Man Logan Wolverine and his son from another dimension, Bloodstorm, Rachel Grey, there’s just a lot here and none of it is explained too well. Generally, this is an issue where readers are thrown into the deep end. Good? Bad? It’s hard to say exactly.

The art by Mike Mayhew doesn’t help as a lot of the characters look too similar. Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey, Jean Grey, they’re all drawn too similarly and things get a bit confusing as to who is who. Their costumes are the tip off to figure that out. That art issue extends to the primer pages written by Robbie Thompson that condenses the history of the X-Men. Mark Bagley‘s art is at times atrocious and feels like it’s phoned in. Look at that final line-up on the final page and tell me things aren’t off. It’s just… bad.

The issue isn’t bad but there’s just too much to make things go smoothly. Writer Marc Guggenheim does what he can with everything and it might have been better to keep things more focused on each team for this storyline to come next. A rough start that plays a lot with nostalgia.

Story: Marc Guggenheim, Robbie Thompson Art: Mike Mayhew, Mark Bagley
Story: 7.0 Art: 7.0 Overall: 7.0 Recommendation: Read

Marvel provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review