January 13^th saw the release of SWORD #3 and confirmed a suspicion of mine: SWORD is among the best titles of 2009. It's too bad this confirmation has arrived just in time for the series' cancellation.

This issue starts off with a bang as we are introduced to a new threat to the beloved Utopia and the return of Magneto! However the Master of Magnetism has not come looking for a fight, instead he has come looking for the leader of the X-Men - Cyclops. What is Magneto’s ultimate motivation, why has he  truly returned ?

‘No more mutants’, with these three words mutant kind was no longer going to replace humanity at the top of the food chain, how could it with the spell working so well that there would be no more mutant babies. They became an endangered species, but unlike the sea otter this population could tear down cities. This new status quo was unbelievably appealing with the question, what would happen now? on the lips of every fan of Marvels merry mutants. However this concepts true potential seems to have been squandered with concepts being put in place, the sentinels guarding the mansion for example, which where either never explored or retconned into oblivion, does everyone remember Iceman being de-powered at the end of House of M, but as soon as the character was picked up in the actual X-books he in fact did have his powers he just blocked them out. We can all blame bad writing for these incidents, however I believe it is more like the writers don’t seem to understand the scale of the actions they take. As X-Men is a superhero book they concern themselves with the constraints of the genre itself, they don’t break the mold. They throw out these massive concepts but don’t necessarily follow them through. Which seems a little ridiculous as they have three titles devoted to the X-Men proper (not to mention the list of other books with an X) and they still have most of them doing the same thing. This leads me onto what is happening at this very moment within the X-verse, the X-Men’s exodus to Utopia, the newly christened island nation of mutant kind.