X-Men: Curse of the Mutants #1

A suicide bomber in San Francisco catches the X-Men's attention. They soon learn of a serious Vampire threat that plans of eradicating mutant kind. 

When I first saw Victor Gischler's name attached to this I was sort of worried. I had only read his work on Deadpool which I wasn't a fan of. To my surprise, I really enjoyed his work on this story arc. I actually gained some respect for him after this. I thought his characterization was excellent for everyone involved. The pacing was great, the plot twists were well incorporated and the outcome was a well constructed story. I remember when Marvel announced the X-Men were going to be facing Vampires. I wasn't thrilled as I'm not a huge vampire fan like everyone else seems to be. This story turned out better then I could have imagined. The mutant/vampire war turned out to be very exciting and thrilling thanks to Gischler. 

One of the big events that happened within this story was Jubilee and Wolverine turning into vampires. Wolverine's healing factor in the end was able to overpower the vampire bite but Jubilee was left a vampire and the X-Men were forced to place her in solitary confinement on Utopia as they search for a cure and a miracle. The mutants can never catch a break it seems. But then if they did, they probably wouldn't be as much fun to read.

I loved seeing the appearance of Blade in this story. I've never had the chance to read any of his solo comics. I've seen the movies but it was nice to see him in comic format. The dialogue between him Cyclops was pretty cool. Then to see him get hit by one of Cyclops optic blasts was pretty funny. We probably won't see him teaming up with the X-Men again any time soon.

This event was good all around but Cyclops did sort of steal the show in his own way. Gischler made great use of his brilliant tactical skills in the fight against the vampires. I won't ruin it as it does come as sort of a shocker. After finishing this, I can see how Schism slowly came to be.

This hardcover edition also includes a lot of bonus material such as an interview with the writer, some information on the artist and a lot of variant covers. 

The art is by Paco Medina who is probably best know for his work on the Deadpool series. I like his style and found it to be a nice change of pace format he typical X-Men art as of late. Medina did a great job capturing all the intense action the story involved. Adi Granov's covers were awesome as usual. 

This one comes highly recommended from me. I'm a big X-Men fan but my expectations were low going into this. After finishing this I couldn't have been more thrilled at the outcome. Another solid X-Men story arc to add to the collection.