Young X-Men is a book in a difficult spot. It got launched right after Messiah Complex as part of the new status quo, but there wasn't really any new status quo in which it could participate until last month's Uncanny X-Men #500. It's also the umpteenth attempt at a young spin-off team for the X-Men. While the earliest tries at this (New Mutants in the 80's and Generation X in the 90's) had long runs, New Mutants and New X-Men in this decade have had shorter runs marked by drastic changes in direction. Early on it was too much soap opera, not enough action. Later it was mass slaughter with no effort to let the character development breathe. Young X-Men signaled in its first scene that it was going to be at least a little closer to the Kyle and Yost New X-Men slaughter-fest by hinting at killing a cast member in the first arc. In this issue we see what really happens with that vision.
CLICK TO SHOW SPOILER And of course, they kill off yet another young mutant, in this case Nicholas Gleason, a.k.a. Wolf Cub. You could definitely see this coming as they've hyped the two new characters (Ink and Greymalkin) too much to get rid of them so soon, so it kind of comes down to who of the others is most expendable. Wolf Cub has rarely had much of a part, and they set him up in this story as being distressingly (to us and to himself) ready to kill. So I didn't find it too surprising that they wrapped up this difficult development by offing poor Wolf Cub with the usual moralizing of the dying teammate telling his friends not to try to cross the killing line like he did. Or something.
The point is that even though Young X-Men improved over New X-Men by making this individual death a big deal for the characters and the focus of the story, rather than just a shocking last page cliffhanger, the body count for this class of students is so incredibly high (especially for the bit part players) that it just doesn't have much impact at all to kill even more of them. So I'm pretty disappointed. After about two years of continuous death and torture under Kyle and Yost couldn't they have come up with anything else to say?
