Age Of X-Man – The X-Tremists #2 // Review
One never knows what a day might hold for people looking charged with keeping order in a dystopian world. What starts out as a dull and hazy glance at political theatre develops into one of the single best issues of the Age of X-Man event as Leah Williams’ X-Tremists pulses through its second outing. Georges Jeanty brings art to the page that is inked by Roberto Poggi with colors by Jim Charalampidis. Williams and Jeanty cast a cleverly thoughtful focus on a couple of characters living in a world where certain fairly basic feelings are outlawed.
After dealing with a child’s skinned knee, the personnel of Department X has serious business to conduct. There’s a “controlled purge” to initiate. They need to start a forest fire for the X-Men to put out. It’s all part of the plan: keeping heroes looking heroic to keep society clinging together in the strange dystopia of the Age of X-Man. Later-on, Psylocke and the Blob begin to deal with something quite decided NOT a part of the designed order of the dystopia, resulting in a surprisingly deep emotional drama between two very different characters.
Williams does a lot of drudgery for the Age of X-Man in this issue. It’s actually kind of tedious for the first six pages. The first six pages can be safely ignored. Forget about the first six pages entirely. Start on page seven. That’s when things get good. The psychic Psylocke approaches Blob to discuss feelings that she knows he has for her. He’s not just embarrassed by this, He’s horrified. Love has been outlawed in the Age of X-Man. She offers to erase his feelings of love for her. He responds by calling into work for days that prompts her to approach him in his home. From the seventh page on, Williams delivers a deeply engrossing emotional drama. Blob (or “Fred” as he is known in this universe) had never been given a terribly charismatic personality. Williams does a very nuanced job of making him very, very sensitive and immensely likable, which is a hell of a job in and of itself. On top of this, Williams actually manages to make a world in which love has been banned fell...believable. It’s surprisingly compelling stuff in what turns out to be, as mentioned before, the single best-written issue in the multi-series Age of X-Man event thus far.
Jeanty and Poggi are given a tricky bit of work here. The opening of the issue features action seen from odd corners. A wildfire not unlike the one the X-Men put out a few months back looks both dynamic and mundane from the point of view of those government agents who are staging it. The art team switches gears quite effectively on the seventh page when an interpersonal drama is delivered in clever framing and smart layout. Blob’s absence from the office is seen in ever-mounting paperwork in an inbox. Later-on his home is seen as a richly intellectual place filled with a vast library of books and walls adorned with framed prints of romantic Mucha-esque images. There are achingly human flashes of emotion across the faces of Psylocke and Blob. For a sustained six pages, the book doesn’t even feel like a mainstream superhero comic. Jeanty and Poggi do a solidly respectable job of bringing the drama to the page.
It’s a bit of a relief to see an issue like this pop out of the Age of X-Man event. A couple of months in, it’s begun to have serious pacing issues as the same thematic elements were echoed through nearly every title without and issue adding anything terribly novel. With any luck, there will be more than a few Age of X-Man issues like this in the months to come.
