Review: X-Men #27
Source: Marvel Comics
The Danger Room arc rolls into its second chapter and Jed MacKay uses the issue to finally pull back the curtain on Maxine Danger's operation. Through a series of prison recruitment flashbacks, we're introduced to the full roster of her new team one by one — a former S.H.I.E.L.D. operations planner who viewed casualty counts as a personal achievement, a small-town manipulator who sparked community-wide violence just to see if he could, and a pair of self-styled Skrull(?) guerrillas who attacked community infrastructure to draw in and kill first responders. Meanwhile, the X-Men are stretched dangerously thin: Cyclops and the main team are trapped aboard a techno-organic living ship in the Gulf of Alaska, Psylocke is waylaid by John Greycrow's arrest, and Glob Herman is fighting for his life after an ambush back in Merle.
The structure here is essentially a villain spotlight, and for the most part it works. MacKay uses the Danger Room's team debrief to show how every piece of chaos the X-Men have been reacting to was deliberately engineered, and there's real satisfaction in watching it all snap into place. The thematic backbone is classic X-Men territory too: the idea that a team of non-powered, methodical planners can dismantle mutant heroes not through raw powers, but by weaponizing their sense of responsibility to the humans around them.
That said, this is still very much a setup issue, and there's a version of this that would have landed harder. Filling this new villain team with entirely new characters means there's no pre-existing investment to draw on, and their visual designs don't compensate. These are forgettable-looking people occupying a forgettable-looking space.
Netho Diaz, Sean Parsons, and colorist Fer Sifuentes-Sujo are the issue’s most consistent strength. The prison recruitment sequences are smartly staged, and Colton's trailer-park flashback is a standout. The layouts open up to show the full scope of the carnage he orchestrated while he sits casually in the foreground, and it sells his menace better than the dialogue does. Sifuentes-Sujo's color work is doing real storytelling heavy lifting here too, with distinct palettes keeping the different timelines and locations readable even as the issue jumps between several of them.
X-Men #27 isn't a bad issue. It's a competent and purposeful chapter that does what early issues in an arc are supposed to do. But it does feel like a transitional one, and the new villains haven't yet given readers a reason to care about them beyond the threat they represent. With Cyclops promising payback and the full weight of the Danger Room's plan now clear, we’ll see if this set up delivers in a bigger way. Whether MacKay can make us genuinely invested in this crew before they're inevitably defeated is the question the arc still needs to answer.
Rating: 3.5/5
