X-Men #1
It’s the dawn of yet another new era for the mutant superteam in X-Men #1, by writer Gerry Duggan, artist Pepe Larraz, colorist Marte Gracia, and letterer Clayton Cowles. This issue marks the official return of the X-Men to the Marvel Universe as superheroes and does a lot of great set-up, but it kind of doesn’t feel like it fits very much with what has been going on for the last two years of mutant books.
It’s hard to really know how to synopsize this issue, but the easiest way is to skip that and just to get right into things. Duggan does a great job of setting up the X-Men’s new status quo in this issue. He introduces several threats throughout, all related to the mutant’s recent terraforming of Mars, and there’s some clues that two people have figured out mutant resurrection- the Daily Bugle’s Ben Urich, who asks Cyclops if Jumbo Carnation designed his costume and then tries to talk to him about how Carnation is back because he worked the mutant beat back then when Jumbo was killed and the mysterious new villain Dr. Stasis.
The X-Men have set up a new base in downtown Manhattan, on the 86th Street Central Park Transverse, which they’ve named Seneca Park, named after the African-American neighborhood taken to put in Central Park in the mid-nineteenth century. A Krakoan treehouse, it’s open to visitors and serves as a park for humans to visit. This is all well and good. The central conflict of the issue is pretty cool, as the new X-Men work together to stop an alien machine from destroying New York City but after the last two years of mutant politics, why are the X-Men becoming superheroes again?
On the one hand, it could just be a PR move- mutants have just claimed Mars, everyone is mad at them, and putting a mutant superhero team in the home of superhero teams “humanizes” them, for lack of a better word. It feels like Duggan, Hickman, and everyone else involved in brainstorming this idea is channeling Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men- making the X-Men superheroes again after Morrison made them into something completely different. It felt weird then- Marvel jettisoning Morrison’s revolutionary ideas so Whedon could pretend to be a feminist and write Claremont-style X-Men stuff- and feels weird now. Hickman’s X-Men may have spun its wheels a lot, but the wheels it was spinning were wheels it had reinvented. Duggan isn’t reinventing any wheels with this one. He’s doing cool superhero stuff, which is fine, but in this Krakoan status quo, is this really what anyone should be doing? The whole point of Dawn of X was to create a new X-Men experience, and, for better and worse, it did. This book is regression. Is that a bad thing?
Well, it depends on how much one wants to read a straight superhero X-Men book. Duggan does a great job of setting up interesting new threats for the team right off the bat in this issue, the team works well together, and there are a lot of intriguing plot points. There are no indications that this will be a bad book- Duggan is a good writer. In fact, it looks like things are going to shape up well in this book. It’ll be interesting to see how things in this book work with the rest of what’s going on with Krakoa. Is this book going to work with stuff from the others? Is it going to set up things for the future, or is it just going to be cool superhero stuff? There’s a lot riding on this comic, and honestly, even if one isn’t entirely down for the X-Men as superheroes, it will still be fun just to see where it all goes- X-Men as people watching, basically.
One thing that can’t be denied is that this comic looks amazing. Larraz and Gracia are the X-Men art team supreme, and this book is yet another example of why. There’s a giant mech fight between an X-Men improvised mech and an alien one. It’s great. The new Treehouse headquarters looks amazing. Every page is a joy to look at.
X-Men #1 is a strange animal. It’s hard to say if a superhero X-Men book is the right way to go after two years of anything but, however, Duggan, Larraz, and Gracia deliver an entertaining story that hits all the right points. There’s some set up for the future, and it will be interesting to see where this book goes.