Wolverine & The X-Men #4 – Review

By: Jason Aaron (writer) Nick Bradshaw (artist) Justin Posner (colors)

The Story: It always sucks to be the new kid.

What’s Good: While I was sad to see Chris Bachalo leave this series, rest assured that the art is in good hands with Nick Bradshaw. His round, friendly lines make the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning just as wonderful as Bachalo did, and his attention to detail is incredible. From the picture of Cyclops on a dart board, to Quire’s copy of the Art of War, to Glob’s papers sticking to him, every panel feels rich and resplendent. The change in art style also reflects a change in tone. The faculty are no longer fighting off external forces that threaten to destroy the school, but are still burdened by the day-to-day difficulties of managing and teaching twenty super-powered adolescents. As such, the atmosphere has lightened, and things no longer look ready to come apart at the seams. There are some truly beautiful shots of Angel against the sun, and everyone’s body language is as expressive as their dialogue.

One of my favorite parts of this new series has been just how well  Jason Aaron has been able to capture the dynamic between the students and the teachers, while keeping everyone in character. Wolverine and company are truly teachers, not team leaders or mentors as they’ve been in other books featuring young mutants, and this relationship informs nearly of their interactions.

The story in this issue centers around the introduction of Angel and the Kid-Apocalypse Evan, who calls himself Genesis. The two  face very different challenges; Evan will have to decide his fate, whether to be savior or destroyer. Worse, he will have go through puberty, bullies, high school drama as figure it out. This has me concerned for his treatment by writers: it will be only too tempting to repeatedly pen stories about him “going evil” only to “redeem himself” in endless and unsatisfying cycles. I’m really hoping that Jason Aaron has a very specific character arc in mind for him, and that he can convince editors and future writers to try to adhere to as tight a story as possible. For Angel, on the other hand, I think the struggle will not so much be about finding himself as it will be about convincing others that he is a very different person than the one they remember. This, I like. At the very end of the Dark Angel Saga, I was concerned that all that the only reprecusion was that he had developed amnesia, and that after maybe a few months, we’d get a story line about him regaining his memories. If the changes in him are as far-reaching as they are implied to be here, the writers have been braver than I would have dared to hope. There’s a lot of potential for some very interesting stories here, not only for this new character, but also for all of Warren’s friends as they adjust to his “condition.”

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.

X-Men: Regenesis #1 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (writer), Billy Tan (artist), Andres Mossa (colorist), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor), Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: It’s the Harry Potter Sorting Hat episode of the X-Men as all the mutants need to choose whether to be on Team Wolverine or Team Cyclops.

What’s good: This was probably an important issue to have.  I could bemoan the fact that they didn’t just do this in the actual issues of the new Uncanny X-Men #1 or Wolverine and the X-Men #1, but this way all the team formation is out of the way and those issues can just get on with the story.  There are just so many mutants that it’s going to take a lot of pages to address them all.

Actually, in some ways, the sheer length and bulk of this issue show why it probably wasn’t great for storytelling to have all the mutants on Utopia.  Storytelling should benefit by splitting them up.

There might be some who are bothered by some characters acting out of character in this issue, but it didn’t really bug me that much.  They’re not real people after all and there is nothing grossly out of character.  The scenes at the beginning of the issue were longer as Iceman, Psylocke, Colossus, Kitty, etc. get extended scenes explaining their decisions.  Here Gillen has a coherent reason why the sides are being chosen and they pretty much make sense and some of the scenes are even kinda cool.