…Isn’t Even Past: All-New X-Men #8 Review

I have a recurring dream where I wander into a keg party at my college in 1991, grab a Natural Light, and wander around until I find myself, at 20 years old, in a corner somewhere. And I say, “Rob: for the love of God, don’t stick your dick in Lynn Mansfield. She will make you into a whinier, more irritating moron than usual for at least a couple of years. Now for Christ’s sake, give me a fucking cigarette. You don’t smoke yet? Well c’mon, let’s get you a pack. You like Marlboros… no, trust me: you like Marlboros.”

Because that’s the fantasy, isn’t it? If we could just go back in time and spend a few minutes with out younger selves, we could impart the wisdom that we wish we had when we were younger, and maybe avoid pain, heartache and perhaps an embarrassing social disease. And in this fantasy, we always assume that we will be grateful for these pronouncements from on high… even though, if you stop and think about it for a second, these pronouncements are largely the same as the ones that came from your father at the time. And not only did you ignore those bits of wisdom at the time, now you look like your father, meaning that the response to your benevolence would likely only be, “Um, when did we decide that lard was part of the food pyramid, fat man? And no, you can’t have any of my cigarettes! They’re, like, a buck-eighty a pack!” And then you will kill your younger self in a fit of rage, and then where will you be? But I digress.

The point is that All New X-Men has, for eight issues now, been an excuse to address that fantastical question: if you could talk to yourself 20 years ago, what would you say? And would it make any difference? Which is not particularly new ground for a science fiction story – hell, Van Damme did it in Timecop, and attempting to follow in the footsteps of Van Damme-age has never been a good long-term plan for anybody. But here, writer Brian Michael Bendis addresses the situation in s slightly different way: what if meeting yourself when you are older corrupts you? What if seeing that things didn’t turn out the way you planned when you were 20, rather than inspiring you to try harder to achieve your plan, instead hardens you, and makes you more cynical and ruthless? Or maybe it just fucking horrifies you, to the point where you’ll do anything to avoid whatever makes you into whatever you become?

It’s an interesting take on your standard Travel-Into-Your-Own-Past (or Future) story… but the question is: with five different original X-Men to follow, along with a bunch of new X-Men, is there enough of a focus to really make any particular point?

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.

Everything Old: All-New X-Men #1 Preview Art By Stuart Immonen

We haven’t devoted a whole hell of a lot of pixels to the Marvel Now! initiative of re-imaging and recasting some books, and restarting others, all with newly mixed up creative teams, partially because thanks to the sheer volume of teaser posters and creative team teases Marvel’s been putting out about the changes since SDCC, and partially because it all seems kinda familiar (but Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Spider-Man has always been an unmarried highly-paid research scientist! And we have always been at war with Eastasia!).

That said, a couple of the books that have been announced are exciting me more than others, and one of them is All-New X-Men, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Stuart Immonen. The concept is pretty interesting and somewhat novel: the original X-Men as created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – Iceman, Cyclops, Angel, Beast and Jean Grey as teenaged school children – travel forward in time and space (and hopefully Bendis remembers the “space” part, otherwise the X-Men will wake up gasping with their blood boiling somewhere off the shoulder of Orion) to the current Marvel Universe and meet their modern counterparts. Meaning that these five idealistic teenagers who firmly believe they are on the side of the angels in trying to save the world will have to come to terms with the fact that they grow up to be the semi-psychotic angst-ridden spastics who started Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Part of my excitement for this title, despite not being the X-Men fan on the staff, is the sheer number of cool, obvious storytelling opportunities this crossover will provide. I’m no comic writer, but I’m guessing we’re going to be seeing: