Uncanny X-Men #4 – Review

by Kieron Gillen (writing), Brandon Peterson (art), Justin Ponsor (colors), and Joe Caramagna (letters)

The Story: The Phalanx returns and the X-Men race to stop its rapid consumption.

The Review:  What a strange issue… I really don’t mean that in a bad way at all.  In fact, I wish more ongoing series did this.  Uncanny X-Men #4 is something a one-shot, and Gillen really makes the most of the opportunity, using the done-in-one format to tell a rather different kind of story with a very different focus.  It’s told from the perspective of a member of the Phalanx, marooned on Earth, and the result is a surprisingly intimate comic.

Gillen’s goal with this comic is to make the unrelatable relatable and to make something utterly alien, and generally construed as evil, into something sympathetic.  That’s no easy feat, yet Gillen does accomplish it.  The Phalanx becomes comprehensible.  It’s logic is still completely at odds with humanity, but that there is a logic operating is clear.  More than that though, while Gillen never shies away from just how different, and thus how opposed, the Phalanx is to humanity, he does a great job of giving it legitimate emotions, feelings of loneliness and affection that are surprising.

Really, Gillen boils the Phalanx down into something that is simply incompatible with humanity.  It feels and it loves, but simply put, what it sees as good and affectionate, humanity sees as murderously destructive. The result is something of a bizarre story that ends up being somewhat chilling.  At the heart of Gillen’s script is an entity that simply doesn’t want to be alone, while also wanting to express its affection, but its means are repugnant.  What you end up with then, is an isolated freak, killing out of love and loneliness, wracked by his conscious, but flailing about lost.  It’s thoroughly unsettling, but Gillen crafts a comic where you actually understand the incomprehensible and feel legitimate sympathy for a creature that commits mass murder while garnering that sympathy.  It’s a morally challenging comic, to be sure.

Of course, the downside to all of this is that in delving into these complexities, Gillen does end up being guilty of overwriting the book a bit.  There is a LOT of narration, so much so that it does slow the book down at some points.  At times, that’s acceptable – it gives the book an ominous tone – but that pace is constant, irrespective of when that ominous tone should be at the forefront or not.  I think Gillen’s biggest crime with all this narration is that he does fall prey on a few occasions of telling rather than showing.  I realize a great deal of characterization was necessary in an issue like this to establish the required intimacy, but Gillen should’ve allowed the art to do a little more of the talking.  I don’t think the reader needed quite so much hand-holding.

Nova Vol. 1 – Review

By Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Sean Chen, Scott Hanna & Brian Denham (artists)

The Marvel universe (by which I mean that vast expanse of space in which Silver Surfer, Galactus, and Ego run around in as opposed to the Marvel Universe, the corporate umbrella that we gather all of the company’s intellectual properties under when we talk about them) has never been an especially interesting setting to tell stories in.  Weird, right?  I mean, this is space we’re talking about, the final frontier.  An endless, ethereal, expanse of limitless potential and imagination where anything can happen.  And yet, despite the wealth of stories that can be told here, Marvel writers have seemed reluctant to do anything with it.  The last time I ever got excited about a Marvel space story was when “The Infinity Gauntlet” came out, and that was eighteen years ago.

Fast forward to 2006 when I began reading  positive fan feedback and critical praise for “Annihilation” a storyline designed to revitalize Marvel’s cosmic franchise.  The story certainly sounded worthwhile, but I wasn’t quite convinced to invest the time and money to collect it.

And then I found out Dan Abnett was involved with the story.

I’d known and been a huge fan of Abnett’s work through his involvement with Black Library’s series of Warhammer 40,000 books (any Gaunt’s Ghosts fans out there?) and it was on the strength of his writing there that I was willing to take another chance on Marvel’s final frontier.  I’m glad I did, because there is new life and abundant imagination to be found here, and nowhere is that more apparent than on Marvel’s flagship space title, Nova.

This inaugral volume collects the first seven issues of the title and spins directly out of the events of Annihilation: Conquest, the sequel to the 2006 crossover.  Following the devastation of the Annihilation Wave, the galaxy has been torn asunder and left in a broken, fragile, and highly volatile state.  There was a time when the Nova Corps was around to maintain law and order, but that time has come and gone and the Nova Corps is all but dead, with only Richard Rider left standing as their sole representative, one man to protect an entire galaxy.  It’s a burden no one person should have to carry, and yet Rider does because he knows it’s the right thing to do and that he’s the only one capable of doing it.

Against this backdrop of one man pushing himself to the limit in order to do the right thing, Abnett and Lanning craft a series of explosive, entertaining stories that are deeply rooted in the continuity established by the Annihilation crossovers, and yet immediately accessible to new readers.  What I most like about this volume, and about the new landscape of Marvel’s universe, is that it is such a fully-realized continuity and fully divorced from mainstream Marvel.

For those of you who, like me, have had enough of mediocre crossovers like ‘Dark Reign’, you have here the opportunity to get your Marvel fix with an excellent comic that has absolutely nothing to do with Norman Osborn for a change.  Abnett imbues this graphic novel with a skilled blend of action, imagination, and pathos that frankly shames anything being turned in by Marvel’s ‘terrestrial’ writers, and if you’re looking for a change of pace in your comics then I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.  This is damn good stuff to read, and I have a feeling it’ll just keep getting better.

Grade:  A

-Tony Rakittke