{"id":4488,"date":"2019-02-03T21:37:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-03T21:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4488"},"modified":"2019-02-03T21:37:30","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T21:37:30","slug":"age-of-x-man-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4488","title":{"rendered":"Age of X-Man: Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"

So here we are again, at the start of another event. \u00a0This is the set-up one-shot which leads in to no fewer than six minis –\u00a0Marvelous X-Men<\/em>,\u00a0NextGen<\/em>,\u00a0Amazing Nightcrawler<\/em>,\u00a0X-Tremists<\/em>,\u00a0Prisoner X<\/em>, and\u00a0Apocalypse & The X-Tracts<\/em>. \u00a0You know how these things work: a basic story that serves as an introduction to the world, and scenes which lead in to all of the individual minis, complete (for once) with footnotes telling you precisely where to go for the follow-up. \u00a0Which is appreciated, by the way.<\/p>\n

The build to this story, over ten issue of Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, was decidedly underwhelming, and left me approaching this issue with a sense of grinding duty. \u00a0But this is night and day. \u00a0“Disassembled” felt like a protracted exercise in getting the right characters into the right place (and not very organically at that), but Age of X-Man<\/em>\u00a0turns out to be going somewhere less obvious.<\/p>\n

Now, none of this detracts from the fact that it is indeed an issue of introduction and set-up, framed by the good old device of a mutant with newly-emerged powers being introduced to the X-Men’s world. \u00a0But there’s a clear sense of where this is going. \u00a0Writers Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler had a short run on\u00a0Cable<\/em> just before it ended, in an ambitious but confused storyline<\/a> which I described as a “wildly unfocussed oddity”. \u00a0No such issues here.<\/p>\n

The initial set-up is straightforward. \u00a0We’re in an alternate reality created by Nate Grey, who has apparently given up on trying to save the real world, and instead cut directly to making a better world from scratch. \u00a0The characters who were fighting him in\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #10 have presumably been transformed into the characters we see here, but (with one possible exception) they don’t remember. \u00a0Everyone else – which means the background characters – is presumably created by Nate.<\/p>\n

Nate’s world is the opposite of\u00a0Age of Apocalypse<\/em>. \u00a0At some unspecified point in the past (far enough back that Nature Girl doesn’t remember it), everyone got turned into a mutant. \u00a0There are no bad guys. \u00a0The X-Men still exist, but the only problems left to be dealt with are young mutants losing control of their powers, and presumably the odd natural disaster. \u00a0It’s not a mutant dictatorship either – this isn’t\u00a0House of M<\/em>. \u00a0It’s just a happy world where everything worked out just great for the mutants.<\/p>\n

Ramon Rosanas’s art catches the white picket fences, Silver Age vibe of the place, but the revised character designs for the X-Men bring in some different influences. \u00a0Their costumes combine a trad superhero vibe with more regular clothing or robes. \u00a0And standing there as part of the team is Nate himself, still wearing something akin to his messiah robes from “Disassembled”, but back to talking about himself as a shaman. \u00a0He’s allowed to blend into the background when we all know that he’s clearly more important to the story than that – a nice touch. \u00a0He also seems to have inserted himself into X-Men history in place of the Beast, who is simply missing and unmentioned.<\/p>\n

And also, Nate doesn’t like couples.<\/p>\n

So this is a world of “individuals”, a word that keeps cropping up. \u00a0They come together as groups, or as a society, but not as couples. \u00a0Everyone new seems to be lab-grown, and everyone seems to believe that humanity has evolved “beyond romance … beyond coupling” – when they even talk about it at all, because it just doesn’t seem to be on most people’s radar any more. \u00a0And if you do attempt to start a relationship, the X-Tremists show up to cart you off to prison. \u00a0Nate, who was grown in a lab, seems to have some real hang-ups about conventional reproduction, and now everyone else seems to have them too.<\/p>\n

This is very much not the direction I was expecting the story to go in. \u00a0And that’s before we even get to the reveal of what Apocalypse is up to. \u00a0It makes sense – his obsession with natural selection means he wouldn’t be keen on a lab-grown world – but the last page reveal of how he’s going about opposing it is completely left field. \u00a0It’s been a while since we’ve seen ideas quite this odd showing up in a core X-Men title. \u00a0It’s not what I was expecting at all, which is very welcome.<\/p>\n

I still have my doubts that a crossover event is going to keep up this sort of focus – they tend not to. \u00a0But this issue really does win me back round after “Disassembled”. \u00a0They have my attention now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So here we are again, at the start of another event. \u00a0This is the set-up one-shot which leads in to no fewer than six minis –\u00a0Marvelous X-Men,\u00a0NextGen,\u00a0Amazing Nightcrawler,\u00a0X-Tremists,\u00a0Prisoner X, and\u00a0Apocalypse & The X-Tracts. \u00a0You know how these things work: a basic story that serves as an introduction to the world, and scenes which lead in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4489,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488\/revisions\/4489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}