X-Men - Kingbreaker/Darkhawk

Yes, I caved, bought Kingbreaker and I think it was a missed opportunity.

The advantage of DnA's cosmic stuff so far is that they have found ways (Often just a cheat sheet) to introduce people to characters like Quasar or Drax, who they may not know. This has meant that throughout the cosmic stuff I've roughly known who everyone is from my own knowledge and info supplied. However, in a slightly questionable maneuver, the next big event is to be a war between the Kree and the Shi'ar, but focusing on the battle between the new rulers of the Kree, namely the Inhumans, and the Shi'ar, Vulcan, who is apparently brother to the X-Men's cyclops.

On one hand this is a good way to pull a segment of the cosmic universe into the fold that had been previously absent, the Shi'ar normally appearing in X-Men books. However while War of Kings: Secret invasion gave some sort of introduction to the Inhumans, the 4 part Kingbreaker did not clear much up regarding the Starjammers or the Shi'ar. If I hadn't looked at wikipedia, I'd not know that both Vulcan and Havok are related to Scott summers, I still have no idea why someone is using the phoenix force or why it suddenly left her and therefore disabled some other guys sword. In short its not a bad story, but I would have taken the opportunity to give some background rather than just assume I knew who everyone was. As a final failing, they messed up the shipping in a really stupid way, OK so you don't want to hold up an entire event because one story goes 1 issue behind. However War of Kings #1 lead directly on from the end of Kingbreaker #4, the problem, War of Kings #1 was released before #4 of Kingbreaker. If I was in any way worried about who got away from the cliffhanger in #3 it was resolved by seeing the crew of the Starjammer in WoK #1. Overall, this event has a lot of work to do, both to match up to its predecessors and win me over form a shaky start.

I suppose you could call it proof that this is a smaller event, or the fact that with two spin-offs doing another 4 minis before getting into the main story could be called a bit excessive. Anyway, the other lead up is Darkhawk, a small two part story. However by the looks of things it will be followed by a story running parallel to War of Kings called Ascension.

Darkhawk is a little known character, Chris Powell, who uses a suit of Alien Armour (it has varied between being armour or a whole android who replaces him but runs from his head) to fight crime. Last we saw he had left the encounter group for teen super-heroes who were trying to give up super-heroics alongside Turbo, Ricochet, Phil Ulrich and Spider-Woman III (The Spider-Girl Ripoff Mattie Franklyn) seen in the Excellent "Loners". And lately in Nova he has been working as head of security at Project Pegasus in his Darkhawk guise in the recent Nova story. WoK Darkhawk sees his life nearly destroyed by the arrival of a Similar Darkhawk type called Talon, and an attack by some sort of drone. The two part story basically focused on Chris accepting that he has to leave his friends and family and Travel into space to properly learn how to use his Darkhawk suit as incompatibilities are causing him anger issues. My only gripe with this series was that it is really a tester, and probably could have been summed up in a one shot for Ascension (Assuming Ascension is what I think it is) rather than a two part which seems to padded and finishing abruptly at the same time. A criticism I read was the removal of the characters uniqueness by making him part of a Corps (or order of the raptors or something) however I am intrigued in what I can only assume is Shi'ar links to the Darkhawk armour, what with the Shi'ar liking their bird comparisons.

In fact, this is what's interesting me about how things are going to come together. Aside from Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy doing the sort of linking I could only encourage, stories being tied together without needing to read both titles, in Nova Worldmind, having stripped Rich of his powers and having recruited and mind controlled a huge number of humans into joining the Corps, has made one of his old recruits, a Shi'ar, Nova Prime. I wonder how the Corps will fit into war of kings. Also War of Kings #1 showed a lot of promise.

So I'm not down on War of Kings, but the minis leading up to it have been less than stellar.