In World Tour, Professor Charles Xavier takes his X-Men on the lecture circuit, while Mark Millar reminds me that I find this to be the least good series I’m reading right now. Basically, human-mutant relations are on an upsurge since the defeat and death of Magneto at the hands of the X-Men, so now seems like the time to capitalize on that by showing off that mutants can be pretty good people too. Only, dark secrets from Professor X’s past and present conspire to not only ruin all of his grand plans but also to tear the X-Men apart. If that sounds pretty cool in summation, it suffers in execution, most notably because every character in the Xavier-centric storyline is annoying, and Professor X the most annoying of all.
Also, there’s a two-parter at the end of the book about mutant Wildcard (I think), who throws playing cards around and makes them explode. I suspect that if I was all into him from having gotten to where he is in the original series, this would have been a big, revelatory introduction. As it is, it was still the best part of the book, easily. Which is probably not a very good sign, but it could be that I’m wrong and it was just strongly written.
The series gets better when they get past the Millar bits. Vaughan and Bendis are much better writers for the book.
My faith in that fact is (after I verified that he stopped writing them eventually) all that got me to read past the first one.
At the end, I believe that is Gambit.
I also found the three UXM books Skwid has to be very mediocre, at best. I’ve heard a lot of good things about them, so I kept reading, hoping for something to grab me. Alas, nothing did.