That’s The Power of Love: All-New X-Men #1 Review

As I have stated repeatedly throughout this history of this Web site, I am not the world’s biggest X-Men fan, despite my long time reading comic books. I’m not sure why they never hooked me in, but my guess is that it’s because those titles were the poster child for extensive, convoluted continuity that thrills longtime readers but is simply impenetrable to new ones.

Go ahead and pick a random issue of any X-Men title from, say, the late 1990s. You’ll see Wolverine; okay, everyone knows Wolverine. Then there will also be some dude from the future with a bionic arm, a gun as big as a Buick Skylark, and no feet – he’s the elderly son of one of the other 20-something X-Men. From the future. Yeah.

And then there will be seven guys you’ve never seen in any other Marvel comic, with names that sound like discarded names from failed 80s Sunset Strip hair metal bands (Shatterstar? Tracy X? Fucking X-Treme?). There might also be an alien, and a couple of coin tosses will tell you if Professor X can walk, or if Magento is a bad guy. And each one of them is fucking, once fucked, or is trying to fuck, each of the others. It’s an inscrutable mess that makes General Hospital look like Dick and Jane.

Besides: through it all, Cyclops was a real dick.

But thanks to Avengers Vs. X-Men, even people who aggressively don’t follow the X-Men have been exposed to the characters, and there is no doubt that that event has seriously mucked around with the mutant status quo. So when you combine that with the fact that Brian Michael Bendis has left the Avengers books he did such a good job rebooting and renovating over the past several years by shaking up the status quo and introducing new characters, and started a new book, All-New X-Men, it would seem that this would be a perfect time to jump into the mutants’ story without being bogged down in years of history and relationships. Right?

Yeah, not so much. However, that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

It is the aftermath of Avengers Vs. X-Men, and Cyclops has escaped police custody, joined up with Magneto and Emma Frost, and begun recruiting new mutants who gained powers after the defeat of Phoenix to their cause, calling themselves X-Men. Meanwhile, at the Jean Grey School, the more official version of The X-Men is debating how to handle Cyclops and his burgeoning messiah complex – go kick his ass and watch humanity turn on mutants again? Or do nothing, and watch humanity turn on mutants again? So Beast, who is busily undergoing yet another painful secondary mutation, has a brilliant idea: go back in time, get the teenaged original X-Men, and bring them forward in time so Teen Cyclops can talk some sense into Adult Cyclops. What could possibly go wrong?

Okay, this is a first X-Men issue at the beginning of a new are of mutant stories at Marvel. So in my opinion, this books needs to accomplish a few things if it wants to bring in readers who have been intimidated or irritated by years of confusing continuity: it needs to give us familiar characters, it needs to clearly show the stakes for the mutants without getting too bogged down in esoterica, and it needs tell the story while assuming that the reader knows fuckall about the X-Men before now. Yes, I know that you X-Men fans are bristling at that idea, and I know that Marvel has damn near shattered their own ribs bending over backwards to assert that this isn’t a reboot (because Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Cyclops has always been a mutant terrorist!)… but the fact of the matter is, if you cough up a book with the words “all-new” in the title, you had best assume that you’re going to get readers who expect it to be, you know, all new. That said, X-Men apprehension or no, I would totally buy at least one issue of a book titled, Same-Shit X-Men. But I digress.

Bendis does actually accomplish a lot of these things. The cast here is somewhat limited, and includes characters that should be familiar to anyone who’s seen at least a couple of the X-Men movies. He effectively demonstrates that mutants are powering up, and he shows that figures of authority will have a tendency to react badly to that powering up, no matter how benign those powers might be. And he even does a decent job setting up why Cyclops is doing what he’s doing for the odd reader who didn’t pick up Avengers Vs. X-Men, and who maybe only knows the character from the X-Men movies (then again, anyone who only knows Cyclops from the movies will probably be more surprised that Cyclops is, you know, doing anything).

But the biggest problem that I felt this book faces is in its base conceit of bringing the teenaged X-Men forward in time. And that starts with: how the hell did Beast go back in time? He’s just suddenly in the past. Do The X-Men have a time machine? If they do, I’ve never heard of it… and having Beast just appear in the past was Goddamned confusing. Further, Beast is supposed to be one of the smartest X-Men. If he had a time machine, why didn’t he use it at the beginning of X-Men Vs. Avengers to go back to, say, 1982 and just push Jean out of Phoenix’s way in the first place? And frankly, if Cyclops is supposed to be less of a dick back at the beginning, why not just go back with an iPad and say, “Hi, Cyclops? I’m from the future. Look at the video on this device that is clearly from the future. See this footage of you being a cock and shooting up a police station? When the time comes? Don’t fucking do that. And oh yeah: buy Apple stock.”

But on the whole, this isn’t a dealbreaker, and I think even Bendis knows that the whole time travel gimmick is a little bit silly – having Teen Cyclops ask Present Beast, “Is it our kids?” is enough of a Back to The Future nod for me to believe that he’s asking readers to just sit back and enjoy a fun story. But what we seem to be setting up here is a new era for the X-Men… that immediately uses time travel to bring the past into the present. In short: my concern is that the opportunity to create a new beginning that is open to new readers is being instead used to immediately begin examining that continuity, right from the beginning. Done right – and Bendis is capable enough to do it right – it can be used as a primer to years of difficult continuity. Done wrong? We get issue upon issue of in-references to the past mixed with the present, and we wind up with yet another X-Men book that will be unreadable to anyone who doesn’t know what happened in 40 years of continuity.

A strong point of the issue is Stuart Immonen’s art. He is in fine normal form here, delivering highly-detailed line work, expressive faces and clear storytelling. He manages to show not only a Beast so detailed you can almost feel his pelt, but shows real terror on the faces of the new mutants who are being hunted by the authorities. It’s tough to objectively review art by a guy with such a distinctive style as Immonen’s, which I honestly have always been a fan of, but suffice it to say: if you already like his style? You’re gonna like the look of this book.

I’ve written a lot about All-New X-Men #1, and I really haven’t said whether or not I actually liked it. And the truth is: I’m just not sure. It accomplished the things that I felt it needed to, and it set up what will be very likely interesting character moments when Teen X-Men meet Adult X-Men, but it does it with a story conceit that even Bendis seems to recognize is faintly ridiculous. It is new reader friendly enough for non X-Men fans to be able to jump in, but it lays the groundwork for a potential morass of continuity references that could really lose people like me fast if not handled right. And frankly, I’m a little disappointed that Marvel has taken the opportunity of a completely new status quo for the X-Men to immediately start embracing their past… and that dense and difficult past was a large part of what kept me out of X-Men in the first place.

Plus, Cyclops is still a dick. Some continuity never changes.