Interesting...
I just jumped into Astonishing X-Men. I thought I was in luck because my comic shop had both issues 38 and 39! But, nope, in an attempt to convey that these two missions were happening concurrently, they have nothing to do with each other. So I have to admit that I'm missing a bit of what's going on in Japan with Scott's team other than what's in the intro. Still, it is an interesting issue. It has Fin Fang Foom, who I haven't seen since the early 1990s in an Iron Man issue. It has this Japanese X-Men code-named Armor who has the awesome power of using her psi powers to create a psi-mecha for fighting with. Apparently Monster Island (from the Godzilla movies?) exists. And they've introduced some limits to Emma due to the tech the bad guy's using.
My only gripe is that the art's a little wonky. I don't know if it's par for the course in Astonishing, but Wolverine, in particular, looks really weird. The way he's drawn, it's as if you took an SD image of Logan and then scrunched it for HD without also stretching it. He looks squat and overly fat is kinda what I'm trying to say here. Every panel with closeups of Wolverine, especially of his face, really took me out of the experience. And that sucked.
But overall the book was .... interesting. Not awesome or exciting. If I didn't have issue 38 (which I really liked), I probably wouldn't have added Astonishing to my pull list. Hopefully things pick up again in the next issue that follows this story arc.