A Quick Look at: Astonishing X-Men #27

This is the third part of the "Ghost Box" story. Once again the writer is Warren Ellis.

-The X-Men return to San Fran with the mysterious box from last issue along with the corpse of the pyromaniac. Beast decides to call in his(girlfriend?)Agent Brand from SWORD to help him figure out what the box was for.

-Upon looking at the DNA of the dead pyromaniac, Beast learns he was indeed a mutant, but a mutant whose X-gene was on the wrong chromosome. Basically what this means is the pyromaniac was a mutant from an alternate dimension.

-Brand arrives and tells the team the box was a Ghost Box. She explains that a Ghost Box opens gateways to parallel Earths, which would explain the pyromaniac. Brand tells the team that since the pyromaniac is from off-world, the whole investigation was now under her jurisdiction. Cyclops manages to convince Brand to let the X-Men deal with things, but she only gives them a limited time before she has SWORD take over.

-After consulting the journal of the dead fake mutant from the first part of this story, the X-Men decide to pick up their investigation in a place called "tian" which is in a cloaked part of China.

-Upon arriving at "tian", the team discovers a floating island with a beautiful city sitting on it. Under the hovering island, they spot a destroyed city. Cyclops splits the team up, sending Emma and Storm to the demolished city. In the floating city, Cyclops' group discover several long dead corpses, and after looking at some computer files Beast learns that Tian was the secret home of the Chinese version of the X-Men.

That's it??? What a bizarre way to end a comic book... To call this story underwhelming would have to be an understatement. This whole story is just taking forever to develop. I like a good, slow developing storyline as much as the next guy, but Warren just isn't providing us enough pieces of the story to keep things interesting(for me anyway). We're 3 issues into this story, and if you were to ask me what was going on, I doubt I'd be able to give you an answer. For a score, I'll give this issue a 3 1/2 out of 10. There was absolutely no action in this issue, which is a terrible waste of Simone Bianchi's marvelous artistic talents. Oh well, on to issue #28.