Writing: Larry Hama
Art: Roberto Flores and Anthony Castrillo
What Went Down: After the Onslaught crossover, the X-Men have decided to hold a cookout/get together with the members of X-Force and Generation X. The issue starts with them playing a friendly game of baseball. Storm is about to come in for a grand slam when the group spots a Sentinel and attacks it. The Sentinel doesn’t put up much of a fight and slams into some nearby powerlines. The robot claims that it was on its way to warn the heroes; it turns out it was an unarmed surveillance unit that learned to feel because of its advanced computer processor. After Onslaught took over the Sentinels, it broke away and managed to observe Xavier turning himself over to Val Cooper in X-Men #57. It’s about to warn humanity about some great threat before shutting down.
Jubilee stares right into the robot’s eyes as it dies; it tells everyone that it’s afraid. Jubilee feels sad because they killed a sentient being, and it reminds her of the Sentinels that learned to feel in Wolverine #73-74. Cable mentions that it was a robot programmed to hunt mutants, and he and Wolverine break into a fight about how not empathetic Cable is. The fight spreads to the various teammates, but Cyclops breaks it up and tells everyone how important it is that they stay together. Storm brings up honoring Professor X’s teachings, and Caliban makes an awkward speech about Professor X loving all of them.
The next sequence takes place at the pool as Cannonball tries to videotape the various heroes lounging around; most of the X-crew harass him or tell him to blow off. After falling into the pool, Joseph offers to help Cannonball, but the youth acts skittish around him because of his past as Magneto. Later the teams cook up some food and there is a three-page sequence that involves a ping-pong ball landing in potato salad and getting sucked clean…no, really. Domino also tells the girls of Gen-X that they are going to need to grow up fast. The members of X-Force ask Cannonball about Wolverine’s ordeal that resulted in him killing Genesis. Wolverine apologizes to Cable for killing Genesis, who was really his son Tyler, and the two share a beer.
Later all three teams gather for a group photo; Gateway even shows up for the picture. A bunch of energy users are flown up into the air for a fireworks show. Jean and Cable offer to join all the mutants in a superficial telepathic mind-meld to share all the positive feelings between teammates without revealing any personal secrets. Nobody refuses the mind-meld, and the mutants go inside after it’s done.
How It Was: Well the cover promises “sixty-four pages of all-out X-Men action,” and…it’s a complete and utter lie. Really there are like two pages of all out action, and the other sixty-two pages are the various members of the X-Men, X-Force, and Generation X participating in summer activities and talking about any recent storylines that Larry Hama has taken part in, i.e. Onslaught and the Wolverine/Genesis fight. The Sentinel fight is very brief and inconsequential; we never find out what the robot was warning them about (probably something to do with Operation: Zero Tolerance), Jubilee cries over it and brings up a two year old story from Wolverine, and then everyone literally forgets about it like it was nothing. It’s pretty bad when the characters themselves don’t even care enough to follow up on lazy plotting.
The rest of the book is just the various X-characters hanging out and talking, and it gets pretty dull. Granted Hama has a cast of about thirty mutants in this book, and he manages to keep their voices unique and give each of them something to say or do. But most of this is reiterating recent plot points, like that Joseph and Gambit don’t get along, or that everyone is sad that the heroes died during Onslaught.
Wolverine does apologize to Cable for killing his son, so that feels pretty significant, but the rest of this is just fluff. Adequately written fluff mind you, but fluff nonetheless. Then again, it is kind of nice to see the characters get a chance to be less serious, since the last couple of years have been Legacy Virus, Age of Apocalypse, and Xavier going insane. It’s just too much doing nothing, and a lot of it is humor that misfires: like why is Monet so disgusted that the ping-pong ball fell in potato salad? It’s just potato salad; it’s perfectly okay to eat, isn’t it. Plus it always irks me that Excalibur doesn’t get invited since there are a lot of former X-Men on that team; X-Factor makes a little more sense since Sabretooth and Mystique are members of that team, but it’s still a sad state of affairs when you have to pick and choose who you have at your X-Reunion. All in all it has a few moments, but it is really unnecessary unless you’re a huge fan of super heroes having fun in the sun.
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