X-Men: Phalanx Covenant (1994)

X-Men: Phalanx Covenant (1994) is the next in our line of continuing down the republished X-Men stories known as the "Milestone Collection." It is a major crossover event that sees, once again, all the X-books interweaving to tell one large story about the X-Men's grand battle against the PHALANX! The story takes place directly after X-Men: Fatal Attractions and I would list X-Men: X-Cutioner's Song as other required reading before this story. The Phalanx is a nigh unstoppable hive mind bent on assimilating as many living and technological things on Earth in order to further their own personal goal of calling to the rest of the hive mind. They have started to assimilate every human they come across, and infect them with the very familiar transmode virus, and have set their eyes on our merry band of mutants, the only problem being that mutants cannot be so easily assimilated. If they can't be assimilated then the Phalanx as decided to eliminate them. This is not the first time that fans of the X-Men series have seen the transmode virus, but this is certainly the largest scale that it is ever seen in and the largest mention of the Phalanx, outside of the Warlock and Magus story.

This is the first milestone story in the collection where you can easily see the shift in art style that took Marvel comics from its late 80s to early 90s style of large dramatic splash pages to a more stylistic splash page that mimicked the rising popularity of manga and anime in the west at the time. This was just the start of this shift, and it gets much more dramatic of a mimicking down the line. Here is another article that examines the shift in art style that comics have experienced over the years. 

The first major positive of the book, is that the story is very dramatic with all its reveals. I will not get too much into it, for fear of spoilers, but there was a few twists and turns that left me a spiral for days to come. It was honestly one of the reasons that it took me so long to read this story, is because I would often have to put the book down and start thinking about what I had read for hours at a time. Questions of what does it mean to be alive or dead. Questions of why certain characters acted that way, and who could we trust throughout the story? Another large positive for this book, for me personally, is that this is the story that introduces many of the Generation X kids, the next generation of mutants. Some of personal favorite X-Men characters, such as Penance and Jubilee, are a part of this group so I loved being able to go back and see the story that they were first introduced in. Also, the villain introduced in this story is very memorable and one that most readers will genuinely fear in their reading. This ideology along with some crazy looking design makes the ultimate villain of this story one for all fans to remember. 

Now on to the negatives. Throughout the story, everybody keeps bringing up that the Phalanx can disguise itself as anything and anybody but we only see this really taken advantage once or twice throughout the story. For a species of alien that is largely based on John Carpenter's "The Thing" I would have liked to see this gimmick been used a little more and with larger stakes at play when it was used. Another small gripe I have, and I will largely show my bias here, but without going into too much detail they waste Forge in this story. They sideline him almost immediately and take away all of his agency and choice for most of the story and I am not down with that, maybe because he is one of my favorites. 

Overall Rating: 8/10