There’s a big crossover going on in the X-Men books right now, and Astonishing X-Men is not invited to the party.  The book is scheduled to end with issue #68 (albeit that it’s being instantly replaced on the schedules by Amazing), so you might have thought that outgoing writer Marjorie Liu would be using these remaining issues to wrap up some outstanding storylines, such as the subplot about Northstar’s immigration status.  Instead, these two issues contain a story that doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything else from her run.

Issue #66 picks up in the aftermath of the Iceman storyline.  The melting ice floods the New York subway and wakes a green tentacled baby alien that can possess people by touching them.  Mostly the alien just wants a hug, so the result is shambling groups of people asking for a cuddle.  The X-Men break its hold on some New Yorkers (using a good old fashioned electric shock) and then try to hunt the alien down, while it apparently manages to hitch a lift on a series of vehicles out of town.

Part 2 has Wolverine and Gambit show up in small town Indiana, still looking for the alien.  As is traditional, the alien’s parents show up in their big spaceship, and teleport the baby aboard along with our heroes and a local X-Men fan called Wendy.  We then end up with a climax in which the aliens decide that Wolverine and Gambit are okay after all because Wendy trusts them so much, and everyone learns an important lesson about growing up.

Guest artist Amilcar Pinna does decent work on these two issues; there’s a nice delicacy and lightness of touch here, and he’s pretty good with the acting.  I’m not so sold on his aliens, who are rather shapeless vines whose living spaceships end up as blurry backgrounds; he does the job in that regard, but it’s not particularly inspired.

We’re firmly in the territory of unrepentantly blatant metaphor with this one.  It’s a story that literally ends with an alien painstakingly explaining the moral, and Wendy serving as our illustration of how the importance of growing up applies to us too, and not just a scared psychic alien octopus.  I suspect the idea was to do something that thematically tied in with the cancellation by saying that sometimes moving on is hard, but you have to do it.  That’s not such a bad idea, but the execution here really is pretty thumping.

It doesn’t help, either, that the story practically begs you to view Wendy as a Mary Sue character.  Not only is she the girl next door figure who gets drawn into the X-Men’s adventure and saves the day with her purity of heart, but the opening scene introduces her as a writer of X-Men fanfic in which a transparent authorial stand-in has an adventure with Wolverine and some aliens.  It ain’t subtle.  Of course, Liu is lampshading the Mary Sue tropes here, but I’m struggling to figure out quite why; the central plot of the story is reminiscent of that sort of fanfic, and it’s hard understand why you’d want to draw attention to that fact.  The best I can guess is that Liu is trying to link this in with the explicit coming of age theme and trying to do some sort of “through our fandom we learn and grow” kind of point, but it really just reads rather strangely.

The first part of this story does check in on a bunch of other subplots, and lets the rest of the cast hang out at karaoke – and these are some of the better scenes.  There’s one issue still to go, and hopefully Liu well use that one to say goodbye to her team in a way that plays to the book’s strengths as the low key, character-driven X-Men book.