X-Men #9 – Review

By: Victor Gischler (writer), Chris Bachalo (pencils), Tim Townsend, Wayne Faucher, Jamie Mendoza & Al Vey (inks), Bachalo (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Daniel Ketchum (associate editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: The X-Men battle lizards and a mystery villain in the sewers of NYC while looking for missing children.

What’s Good: The X-Men work best when you reduce the cast of characters.  This issue (and storyline) features Storm, Emma, Gambit & Wolverine.   Toss in Spider-Man (amazing who you meet in the sewer!), and you’ve got a good cast.  Gischler keeps the story bouncing along by keeping the cast small and also not foreshadowing any future storylines.  Usually, I like to see little teases of what is coming up next, but Gischler somehow makes it work really well.  He is also really getting a handle on these characters quickly.  For example, I thought that in the first issue of this arc, he was writing Emma Frost as too whiny (complaining about the muck in the sewer), but he’s got her nailed by this issue where she’s being more sarcastic about the working conditions.  [Note: Although these are fictional characters that don’t have a set personality, there are ways I prefer the characters to be depicted.]

The story itself is pretty cool and does flow from the really strong Shed storyline in Amazing Spider-Man ~#630, but if you didn’t read that you’ll be fine because the true villain in this story isn’t the Lizard, it’s someone a lot worse.  The sequence where Gischler reveals the identity of the mystery villain is really well executed from a mechanics standpoint.  He spends a page or two with the villain speaking through word balloon pointing off the page.  The entire time, the panels are composed with really tight shots so you can’t really tell where they balloons are coming from.  Then, the villain is revealed after a page turn.  Wonderful!  Gischler is pretty new to comics, but this is the type of thing where you think, “This guy gets it.”  Way too many comics spoil these types of revelations by having the villain standing there in a full-page splash on the right hand page so you look over there and see the baddie before you’ve read any of the lead in.  [Note: This issue starts oddly from an ad placement standpoint.  After the customary X-title page with the credits and recap, the first left-hand page is an ad, making the first page of the actual comic on the right-hand side.  This is very unusual and I wonder if it was done to accommodate this villain-reveal.  If so, BRAVO guys because that reveal was kinda the key to the issue.]