Holy crap! “Messiah Complex” is awesome!

For a while, I’ve been losing my interest in X-Men – I’ve been down to Astonishing, just so I could say I finished out. That, and it’s got my favorites in there. It’s a Storm and Nightcrawler away from my all-time favorite team. But yeah. I couldn’t handle Mike Carey’s run on X-Men. I was just bored, and Humberto Ramos’ art was too distracting. And the Emperor Vulcan thing eventually wore on, being 6-8 issues of story stretched out across a year. It wasn’t bad, I guess, as I was a fan of Deadly Genesis. But I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up a story that was just okay to good.

But some of the previews for Messiah Complex had me interested, but by the time I got back to the comic book store, I hadn’t realized it was underway – and that I was five issues behind. But after debating picking it up again, I decided to take the plunge – and I’ve been thrust into one of the best crossovers since Mutant Massacre.

What’s not to love? The stakes are as high as ever. Where Operation: Zero Tolerance kind of raised the stakes, everything ended up fine in the end. Well, except for three lame members added to the team, though I do have a secret affinity for Maggott. But Onslaught hasn’t excited me since I was 12 and didn’t know any better. The stakes were “high” then. But with Messiah Complex, it’s an actual state of emergency. And everyone is involved.

With the birth of the new mutant baby, it seems that hope has entered the picture. But in the desperate scramble to find him, everyone’s ideology is affecting the story more than anything else. With the Purifiers, the mission is to destroy the mutant child, and they do so in an oh-so-biblical way. They go to the Alaskan town and kill off every child there in case one of them is the Christ child … err, mutie. Sinister wants a lab rat, the ultimate way to control mutantcy in ways he’s only dreamed of before. But Cyclops is perhaps the most dangerous of all – he’ll take down his own son in his Ahab like quest to obtain this child. While it signals the hope for mutantkind, he’s become obsessed with the child, but isn’t analyzing why he wants it. He wants it because of the future – which is obvious when you see the way he sends Madrox’s dupes into the two possible futures.

So in the end, we end up with one person holding the key to this clash – Cable, and he’s not going to give it up to anyone. Once a throw-away militant in the big guns 90s era, Cable has grown over the years into a real character. But while taking a piss last night as a mid-Messiah break, I began to think – Cable is the ultimate X-Man. Given Cyclops’ quest, he might be the only true one left. Even the New X-Men, the next generation, has become obsessed once they find out the Purifiers are involved.

There’s a lot going on in this story, but every time I think something is forgotten, the new issue touches on it. And so we’re left with an epic scope to the story. The mansion has been destroyed again, sure. But the world that’s been created since Decimation is being turned upside-down. Like the team-on-the-run days, we have the potential for an all new face to the X-Men. And for the first time in a long time, or ever, I’m excited by what X-Force has in store.

But what’s going to be the ultimate end to the story? With Cable and the Reavers squaring off, will he not succeed as the savior? And is anyone’s quest currently right? And they’ve said Magneto won’t be directly involved with Messiah Complex, but really, how far can he or his children be? Also, what do we know about the new mutant girl? Is she really a great hope for all of mutant-kind, or is she something else entirely?

Consider me hooked.