X-Men Annual #12

Chris Claremont and Art Adams bring us Ressurrection, the 7th part in the Evolutionary War saga. The story takes the X-Men to the Savage Land as the High Evolutionary wins the respect of Havok, the team battle Terminus and there's some of the almost trademark and always frustrating Storm fan-wanking that plagued Claremont's later day Uncanny X-Men work.

This story is just bad bad bad. The annoying thing is, there's actually a pretty good bit in there with Havok allying with the High Evolutionary but Claremont focuses almost the entirety of the issue on that standard "Storm is a spiritual goddess" bullshit that only recently completely bored the pants of off everyone in his awful Fall of the Mutants Uncanny X-Men issues. To read this era of Uncanny X-Men is utterly embarrassing, especially when you compare it to it's sister-book X-Factor. In one book you have amazing Apocalypse/Archangel stuff and the other you have Claremont just going on tangent after tangent about Storm's spirituality. I'd say after Mutant Massacre, everything Claremont wrote just became insanely repetitive and furiously melodramatic. This issue is without a doubt no exception to the rule. There's even a sequence of Colossus screaming "NO!" again and again between unconvincing psuedo-pretentious inner-monologues about life.

The good things about this story are few. Art Adams art is great and definitely the best thing about the story. There's some great splash pages of Terminus fighting the X-Men. Story-wise the only really good bit is, as mentioned, Havok's part. Havok is pretty much seduced by High Evolutionary's charisma and ambitions and there's a fantastic comparison from Havok between the Evolutionary and Professor X. This is all across 2 or 3 pages. The rest is just Storm parading around being an over-powered Queen who can cross between dimensions with thanks to Claremont's constant retcons to big up Storm over in Classic X-Men.

It's a real shame that this story decided to go down a completely different route with Storm rather than actually exploring the X-Men and their place on the evolutionary ladder. The X-Men's relationship with the High Evolutionary shown was without a doubt interesting and the stuff with Havok was promising. Towards the end, we get a good set-up for the rest of Evolutionary War with Wolverine and Longshot discovering that the High Evolutionary has ulterior and dangerous motives but nothing comes of this except serving as a means to end the X-Men's "relationship" with the High Evolutionary. These little bits are all good parts of the Evolutionary War, but what isn't is all the frequent nonsense with Storm being faster than the speed of light or suddenly having a magic gem that lets her cross through dimensional barriers. This is sadly not a good issue, not just of Evolutionary War but of X-Men in general, and is only worse because it clearly presents plenty of things that could've been good.