Uncanny X-Men #542 Review
Uncanny X-Men #542 is the third issue of Kieron Gillen’s current run on the series. It is tied in to Marvel’s Fear Itself meta-plot. I’m much too poor to read every book Marvel puts out, so I don’t have the whole picture of what Fear Itself is about. Fear not! Using context clues, I’ve deduced that a mysterious baddie has put seven Thor-like hammers about the place. The hammers make powerful guys more powerful. Fear feeds that power.
Guess who has one and is making a bee-line for X-Men HQ?
The Juggernaut, bitch.
Gillen pleasantly surprised me with how he has used the Juggernaut as the primary antagonist of the piece. I’m used to Juggy being an explosive, if dim, powerhouse. The kind of character that shows up and does his damage. Wham-bam-thank-you-corpse style.
However, in Uncanny #540-542, the Juggernaut has steadily crossed the country, one unyielding step after another. The X-Men try everything they can think of to slow him and nothing is working; Juggy barely reacts to even the most ingenious of power-combos. This is a Juggernaut that is truly unstoppable. What Gillen has done here is a master-stroke. With Gillen’s skilled pen, The Juggernaut is imbued with the same terrifying, deliberate pace that make zombies so pant-wettingly horrific – no rushing. It doesn’t matter if the attempt to flee is made; he’ll catch up eventually. Inch by measured inch. It’s a beautiful direction to take the bulky brute, and it really gives me the creeps.
The beauty continues when you realise that, not only is this an unstoppable harbinger of destruction, but it is a destructive force that is amassing popular support from the general sapien public. The unrelenting force is calling for the elimination of either the population of San Francisco or mutant-kind. He’s not fussy, but he’s got swathes of followers. It sets up a paranoia fuelled political arena as each side expect the worst.
If you’re interested in using comic to draw parallels with real world issues, X-Men books have always been a great vehicle for social commentary, if sometimes bordering on the ham-fisted. Gillen takes full advantage of X-Men in that regard while remembering to tell an entertaining story. A story that draws from the religious political right-wing and sets it against the liberal setting of San Francisco. Even if you don’t read that much into it, the well crafted book does its job on both levels.
While most of the X-Men fail to impede Juggernaut’s progress one bit, Colossus has quite the adventure. I won’t spoil anything but… boy, is it a game changer.
Rating: 
