Age Of X-Man: The Marvelous X-Men #5 // Review
Nate has been building a well-meaning lie. He’s very powerful but he’s also very stupid. Don’t be like Nate. And for the love of Kirby don’t write a series like The Marvelous X-Men. There were a couple of people who already did. Their names are Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler. Don’t hold this against them. They’re probably actually really nice people and pretty good writers. You wouldn’t know it to read the final issue of the mini-series, though. Their story has been admirably brought to the page by Marco Failla. The Age of X-Man continues to draw to a close with its first final issue. The art’s good. The story isn’t.
There’s been a murder. It turns out that the crime in question was the result of someone looking for a member of the X-Men who had gone missing. The investigation results in some pretty profound revelations. Those begin to draw the curtain on the deeper intentions of a guy named Nate who tried to make a sweet, little utopia for mutants only to get drowned in the usual sorts of problems that are the exclusive domain of anyone stupid enough to think that they can build the perfect world for ANYONE.
Thompson and Nadler might have been moving off in a new direction with a series that framed the X-Men as shining heroes beloved by all, but this final issue in the series sees it all falling apart pretty predictably. The underlying intentions beneath all of the totalitarianism (and suppression of love and so on) are rendered in clunky exposition that attempts to bring the drama to the page without much of an attempt to draw in the reader. In spite of the rather novel idea of framing the chapter around a murder investigation, this final issue in the mini-series kind of a muddled mess of an endeavor. Thompson and Nadler clearly know what they want to develop with this series, but they’re five issues into a five-issue series, and they still haven’t managed to find a compelling way to deliver it.
Failla’s art in this issue is good. Really, really good. It’s better than a script like this deserves. The drama between characters comes across with powerful intensity. This would actually MEAN something if it weren’t for the fact that the script hasn’t spent enough time building momentum to this final issue. There are some beautiful quiet moments, including a very tender moment with a sleeping Jean Grey and a very striking moment of homicide. A superhuman communion with living bacteria in a dead body is given a really potent visual impact. It’s all so visually compelling that it’s kind of easy to forget that there really aren’t any fight scenes in the issue except for a few rather confusing panels at issue’s end. There’s a homicide in flashback, and even THAT was impressively serene. Ideally, an issue doesn’t have a script like the Marvelous X-Men #5...but if it HAS to have a scenario like this, then it’s REALLY going to need art like that which Failla is bringing to the page here.
It’s easy to be critical of Thompson and Nadler for the end of this series, but this issue isn’t really the end. The final conclusion of the events which flowed through this series will happen in The Age of X-Man: Omega which will come out when all of the rest of the series comes to a close this summer. It’s difficult to imagine the chapter which would make the five issues of this series feel at all satisfying as a contiguous whole, but there is every possibility that everything will wrap-up with some level of satisfaction once everything is lowered into place in that final issue of the event. This issue, though? This issue isn’t terribly good.
