Friedman is a competent enough writer in this genre, and his background both in comics and in Trek would seem to make him the obvious choice to write this tale. However, it just never gels. Both the X-Men and Trek characters are so locked in stereotype and corporate rigidity that little can be done with them anymore. The subplot involving the rise of beings with mutant powers on the planet Xhaladia is mildly more interesting if only because these characters, not being part of the established continuity, can go through some growth and change. The incipient romance between Picard and Storm, leader of the X-Men, might have led somewhere interesting if Friedman had been allowed to follow it to its logical conclusion, but of course everything must return to the inoffensive, corporate beige status quo by the end of the book.
Heroes meeting heroes across legends is a process as old as mythmaking.
The Morte d'Arthur and the entire myth of the Round Table can be viewed in one sense as a giant medieval team-up, as the legend of Arthur swept up the concurrent legends of Gawain and Lancelot and all the rest before it. However, no one owned Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, they were the collective intellectual property of Western Civilization. If nothing else, this book is living proof that no one should own the basic archetypes and myths which define a culture. A veteran of the comic book field, Mark co-created the 1980's Canadian superhero Northguard and currently writes the Canadian political parody series Angloman both in the form of a paperback book series and as a weekly comic strip in the Montreal Gazette . He lives in Montreal with his computer, his slippers and a motley collection of books.