{"id":7631,"date":"2022-02-24T21:15:20","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T21:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7631"},"modified":"2022-02-24T21:15:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T21:15:20","slug":"x-men-1-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7631","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #1-5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 6 #1-5<\/strong>
\n“Fearless”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtists: Pepe Larraz (#1-3), Javier Pina (#4-5)<\/strong>
\nColourists: Marte Gracia (#1-3), Erick Arciniega (#4-5)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan White<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s kind of a guess, actually.\u00a0The solicitations for the first trade paperback have it covering issues #1-6. But issue #6 isn’t labelled part of “Fearless” and seems to be the start of a new arc. So, I’m going to figure that the first TPB is actually meant to be issues #1-5, whatever the solicitations say. Because that would make some kind of sense.<\/p>\n

Ish.<\/p>\n

When I think about the first few issues of Gerry Duggan’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em>, two main things spring to mind. One is the art. I love the art. I enjoyed Pepe Larraz’s work on\u00a0House of X<\/em>, and he’s great here too. That low-angle establishing shot of the Treehouse in issue #1 is fabulous, but so is the body language in the exchange between Cyclops and Ben Urich that follows. It really gets the sense of both characters dancing around the topic. His action scenes are dynamic, but the parade of aliens in Gameworld is full of invention. Dr Stasis’s weird suburban home is suitably creepy (the pallid colouring helps there too). Issue #3 is mainly a big pointless fight, but at least he brings the crazy animal soldiers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Larraz only draws the first three issues, but Javier Pina’s work on issues #4-5 is pretty sound too. The panels of Nightmare skipping across New York’s rooftops which his cloak trailing as smoke behind him are lovely; the scale in astral Jean dwarfing Nightmare is wonderfully done. Issue #5… yes, okay, that’s more of a straight fight issue, but it still looks good.<\/p>\n

So the art is earning its keep. The story isn’t so satisfying. This volume of\u00a0X-Men<\/em> was launched at an awkward time, coming after Jonathan Hickman had finished his run, and at a point where everyone knew he was leaving, but at a stage where he was still writing\u00a0Inferno<\/em>. That causes a few problems. A lot of the appeal of the Hickman run is the sense of a big picture; as I’ve said before, he got away with an awful lot because he was very good at assuring the reader that it was all heading somewhere. Little of Hickman’s run really works without that wider context (the Vault arc being the main exception). So if you’re telling the audience that, actually, on reflection, we’re doing something else… well, there’s a bit of work needed to shore up the sense that this is still heading somewhere, and that we aren’t just pulling the plug a third of the way through a story.<\/p>\n

Ideally, then, this book would hit the ground running and start setting a good strong agenda for the future. But it’s kind of hard to do that when Inferno\u00a0<\/em>is still to come out and the big turning point hasn’t been reached yet. With hindsight, quite a few books feel like they were marking time between “Hellfire Gala” and\u00a0Inferno<\/em> waiting for the next season to begin.\u00a0X-Men<\/em> was one of them – technically it was the only X-Men book, yet it still felt like the B-title.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0X-Men<\/em> has a high concept idea, it’s that the X-Men have set up in New York rather than in Krakoa, and they’ve become more of an outreach project trying to bridge the gap with the outside world. Which is fine, but it’s not really the focus of these first issues. You can see how it’ll become more of a focus in the future, with the second arc seeing Cyclops stuck in an unwanted new identity to indulge the Quiet Council’s obsession with keeping resurrection secret. There’s some groundwork laid for that, and a definite chance for this book to find its feet in the next arc. Dr Stasis is being built up as a villain in the background; so to a lesser extent is Feilong.<\/p>\n

But the A-plot of these opening issues is… fight of the month, basically. A bunch of alien gamblers send random stuff to attack the Earth, and the X-Men fight it. Two issues of variation on that, and it comes off as just random nonsense; there’s no terribly clear reason why these guys are specifically X-Men villains, or what any of it has to do with this book. Issue #3: the High Evolutionary shows up to have an issue long fight scene and then leave some directions for the future plot. Issue #4: a completely unrelated story about Nightmare, tying in loosely to\u00a0Death of Dr Strange<\/em>, but still inexplicably billed as “Fearless, part 4”. Issue #5: let’s fight the Reavers while reminding ourselves that Polaris is cool, actually.<\/p>\n

If there’s a unifying thread to all this, it’s not leaping off the page. A lot of it, frankly, just feels like extended fighting to fill the pages while the book is waiting for more important plots to come to the boil. The Gameworld thread just kind of disappears. There are some good character moments in passing but not much sense of an overall team dynamic. I’m honestly not sure why Sunfire is even in the book. I get why they wanted to follow up on Synch and Laura from the previous volume, but does any team really need\u00a0two<\/em> characters with the power to copy other people’s powers?<\/p>\n

It’s very nice to look at it, and from panel to panel it’s very dynamic. But it feels arbitrary and directionless. And in the transition out of the Hickman era, that’s the last message the X-books wanted to be sending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN vol 6 #1-5 “Fearless” Writer: Gerry Duggan Artists: Pepe Larraz (#1-3), Javier Pina (#4-5) Colourists: Marte Gracia (#1-3), Erick Arciniega (#4-5) Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Jordan White That’s kind of a guess, actually.\u00a0The solicitations for the first trade paperback have it covering issues #1-6. But issue #6 isn’t labelled part of “Fearless” and seems […]<\/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-7631","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\/7631","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=7631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7633,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7631\/revisions\/7633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}