Finally! District X takes off again with a fresh new story arc. Unfortunately for its antagonist, I fear the story has nowhere to go. This dead end spells big time trouble for the team at District X because, as I noted while reading and quite to my surprise, this issue is the first of seven – yes SEVEN.

I mean, the big problem here is that this issue was great. It starts with a sort of standoff, hostage situation, and fills the reader in on all of the particular details that lead the young man into this hostage situation. It is a quick, and a bit cliché sort of list of events, but it works with great art and dialogue. Again Hine challenges the reader to check themselves for any prejudices, any bigotry. The kid mentions that his father likes to think of himself as a liberal, then we see the father rage on and on about the evil that is mutants and the threat that they represent to the “normals”. All the while, through the magic of comic bookery we know that his son, the boy who he is ranting about, is in fact a mutant.

This is a sort of typical moment for District X and one of many that has you wondering how often you feel, think, or say things which are 1. discriminatory 2. mean spirited or 3. just terribly wrong and awful. I think you get the point.

Anyway, what this story has that the previous ones lacked was momentum. It moved along nicely to a finale which was not so final. In fact, as I mentioned previously, it is the first of seven issues. That is the number seven – 7! And the hard part is that the story is over. What else are they going to put in? Should the boy and his lovely she-wolf captive come to understand each other? Are we going to watch for three issues as the boy’s father reluctantly defeats his own denial and accepts the fact that his son is different, only to watch him be mowed down in strafing gunfire? Or will it be that the kid is mistakenly turned bad guy by the events which are destined to unfold in a no doubt painfully slow and agonizing fashion?

Whatever happens, my guess is that it won’t be much. I have seen the light, and now I understand that District X longs to be a slow moving comic which displays for its reader vastly over detailed minutia sprawling the expanse of infinite possibility. To that end it will lose many readers and no doubt end on issue number “cancelled” in the middle of a 48 issue story arc depicting the troubling issues surrounding mutants and annual flu vaccinations – why some doctors are refusing them at the doors: shortage or bigotry? You decide!

As for me I will keep reading, if only to be excited and surprised on the rare occasion that every eight books or so one like this issue comes along. I loved it all, except for its dire warning of the next six months and their mind numbing social meanderings.

-Peblee