Wolverine and the X-Men was an excellent series that started well and then began to taper off from about Volume 5 onwards. Volume 7 is easily the worst addition to the title yet with an extended look at the Hellfire Academy. Earlier in the series, Broo was nearly killed and has regressed from a hyper-intelligent boy to a savage, thoughtless creature. Idie has followed him to the Hellfire Academy to find out who nearly killed her friend and Quentin Quire has tagged along - though he has mixed fee...

The only reason I didn't score it a 5 is because there wasn't enough of my main man Doop in this volume. What a great conclusion to the Hellfire arc, I really enjoyed how fun this title is (probably because I've been reading a lot of DC's doom and gloom). The best part for me was just how crazy the Hellfire school teaching methods were.

This was a good, dramatic, climactic installment of this series... but it still suffers from the same weirdness.What is this? Does Jason Aaron even know? Is it a spoof? Is it dark? Is it an adventure? It’s very hard to nail down the tone and that makes the whole thing feel a bit off kilter.Still... this collection worked. There was some a sense of stakes, and some exceptionally satisfying moments. In the past, this series has gotten so weird it’s off putting. This time, it was so weird it was aw...

The worst arc of an awful run. This arc is focused on the Hellfire Brats, one of the absolute dumbest and most obnoxious concepts I've ever come across. I hate them for all the wrong reasons - I don't want to see them defeated, I want them never to have existed. There's more of the shallow characterization that was so common in this series. And just to ramp up the stupid, it has a 14-year-old girl in a Hellfire Club outfit - the sort of thing the White Queen wore in the '80s. This is wildly inap...

This was the volume the series had been building to, and really it didn't disappoint. We finally see the Hellfire subplot come to a head as the X-men invade the Hellfire School and we see the battle we've been waiting for. Some of the scenes involving the inner working of the Hellfire School were a little silly, but overall this was a strong volume. The art on this series really started to grow on me too. I see a lot of Art Adams in the style.As I've stated in previous reviews, this has been one...

This volume really hit the spot. The story built up nicely even through there was huge amounts of action. We had apparent betrayals that was really burgeoning love, setbacks that were really curiosities, and islands that get to fight Voltron. What's not to love?Oh yeah, and Hellfire School is out of business. What a sigh of relief.I love the teasers for the next volume, and hope this means we've going to get a new janitor. Toad really deserves a promotion.

3.5 starsA big improvement over the last volume, so I'm feeling a bit better about this title again. Dog Logan makes a cameo, but his particular brand of crazy doesn't hijack the plot this time around. He's a professor at the Hellfire Academy along with several other villains, which makes this volume feel like a reverse of the (volume 5, I think?) one where Kitty was interviewing teachers. Well, now we get introduced to the Bad Guy's version of what a mutant academy should be like.Anyway, the ma...

Not really that good, but still mildly entertaining. I was glad to see that Nick Bradshaw drew nearly every page of this book. I love this guys artwork.

This whole Hellfire Saga is incredibly underwhelming. It has pacing and dialogue issues that stem from Aaron's inconsistency as a writer. The villains are children who, for some reason, are in charge of actual villains like Mystique. Okay then, that's totally believable. Furthermore, the absence of Wolverine in a series where he is the titular character is very disappointing. An uninspired volume of a series that has averaged okay storylines.

Ummm... did Iceman just turn into Voltron? What in the fuck... overpowered much?

The most dull book in the series to date. The Hellfire school is just so, so expected. It's exactly what you would expect to see in a school openly designed to turn teenagers into evil cannon fodder, and not one clever idea more. Half of the scenes with the villainous teachers could have been rewritten with any one of a dozen minor villains, with not a single line of dialog needing to be changed. This could have been better, could have been more original, could have been more clever, could have

I'm not wholly convinced the story makes sense, but who can resist a school for evil, played (mostly) for laughs and then explosively shut down? Reading the last couple of issues feels like guzzling packets of Nerds while drunk on a rollercoaster.

This series is really growing on me. At first I thought it was geared at new readers and younger readers, which may be true but die hard fans get lots to chew on once you get into these books. Once again I was thinking " a hellfire school book" oh brother, then I consider maybe Aaron is poking fun at the whole "school" idea and the comedy lends to that. Aaron really know his material and how to make the best of any situation. This book we start to see the hellfire school grow with new students,

Gigantic mis-step of the art in the first ish...QQ looks terrible. Luckily, that artist is only at it for one issue.QQ ends up figuring some things out, and goes to the Hellfire Academy...seemigly for the wrong reasons in the eyes of the faculty, but you, dear reader, if you've been keeping up, know that QQ's not that 1-dimensional.Meanwhile, Wolverine and the faculty are tearing the Hellfire Club apart to find their kids. (I particularly like what the thought bubbles are of the soldiers while R...

This feels like the final volume of Aaron's run on Wolverine & The X-Men.It's not. There's one more to go, but this wraps up the underlying villain of the series: The Hellfire Club, by placing all the events at The Hellfire Academy, the villainy version of The Jean Grey School.This book is seriously lacking in Aaron's usual flair for storytelling. All of the elements from his fall in the proper place, but they feel idly dropped in those areas, as opposed to placed. By the end of the story, all t...

“Mommy, I had too much cotton candy and I’m feeling sick. Can I get off the donkey now?”Jason Aaron stayed on the donkey that is Wolverine and the X-Men one too many trips around the petting zoo. From Frankenstein’s Big Top Circus to Dog Logan and now this, The Hellfire Academy.This volume seemed to go on for an eternity; spinning its plot wheels over and over again, with Aaron’s sense of humor the only thing keeping me turning the pages.The kiddie Hellfire Club has been an ongoing plot line in

Fun, funny, and a great payoff of the Kade Kilgore/Hellfire subplot that's been tormenting us since this book's inception.I've gushed about Aaron's book for so many volumes I don't know what else to say - did he put in another great set of scripts, with zany ideas and goofy over-the-top interactions among the characters? Check. Was the art suitably whacko and bigger than life? Check. Did the Hellfire kids keep up their petulant ways? Mostly, check. Do we learn more about the inner life of charac...

All you need to know is this: Ice-construct Voltron. This creative team has really grown on me. Aaron has been putting together a grade-a story from the beginning and Bradshaw's art has really stabilized and taken off. The prelude chapter is a bit lackluster, but mainly because of the art. Seeing the Hellfire Club story finally come to a head was extremely satisfying. There are no corners cut here. You get a sense of history and newness. The cast comes together well to show the new generation of...

Man sometimes I feel like Jason Aaron hates comic books and thinks all of us comic readers are dumb. Sometimes in some of the stuff he writes it’s just so ridiculous that I think he is making fun of these characters. At least that’s how I felt about issue 31 of this volume. Smh. Also for this series to be called Wolverine and the X-men, there’s not a lot of Wolverine in it. Luckily the rest of the story some what gets back on track. The Hellfire club now has there own school to teach people to b...

I continue to love the sheer fun this book embodies. People (ie internet trolls) often critique this element of the book, as if "fun" is not an element of the X-Men mythos. I grew up on baseball games in the backyard of the school, and bedtime stories told by Kitty Pryde, so this is an amazing departure from grim-n-gritty, guns, guts and sluts. Who can not appreciate Iceman in a giant ice robot form?The fun does take a bit of a turn here, however, as Kade Kilgore ups the ante on his anti-mutant