I was a little
hesitant to read this book. I found it at the library and it’s been checked out
at least once but I put off reading this title because I have yet to read the
Avengers Vs X-Men (AVX) cross-over series that takes place immediately before
the events of this book. I know a few things that happened during that
cross-over event, like that XXXXXXXX kills XXXXX. (I’m not going to give out
any spoilers here, folks! Yes, I found out thanks to spoilers- some were by
accident from FB posts from friends and some were intentional like the blabbermouth
headlines that reveal spoilers without warning from the idiots at Yahoo!)
Anyway, I was
concerned that if I read this book first that I would be totally lost having
not read anything from AVX. Thankfully, the writers do a very good job getting
the casual reader of current X-Men titles, such as myself, up to date pretty
quick within the first few pages of the first issue.
In the All-New X-Men,
a dying Hank McCoy tries to fix the mess Cyclops and his Phoenix five have left
of human/ mutant relations by going back in time and bringing the original
line-up of X-Men to the present. He hopes that by having a younger Cyclops see how
rotten he grows up to become it will shock him into changing events during the
AVX storyline. But there’s a small winkle in Beast’s plan as a very young Jean
Grey has developed her mind reading abilities way to soon thanks to the shock
of travelling in the time stream. Will she be able to control herself while her
team of displaced mutant heroes decides to make the most of the present?
This series is proof
that what was old is young again. Although, there’s a big twist as the ‘current’
line-up of Wolverine, Storm, Blue Beast, Ice Man, and Kitty Pryde are now seen
as the ‘old X-Men.’ There’s some really mind-bending quantum mechanics behind
this new wrinkle in the X-Men time stream, but I liked it.
What I did not like was
the pacing and paneling of these issues. Several pairs of pages have the
sequence of events going from extreme left to extreme right, meaning instead of
stopping at the bottom of page 2 you then pick up at the beginning top of pager
3 the reader’s eye is asked to go all the way across. What makes this confusing
is sometimes there’s a panel that’s stuck in the middle of the two pages and after
you finish page 2, you go to page 3 and find you’ve gone backwards somehow. I’ve
haven’t seen creatively weird sequencing since the New Gods work of Jack Kirby.
But at least he drew little arrows telling the reader which panel to follow
next. Hopefully volume 2 will not have this problem or at least have those
handy arrows lying around for direction purposes.
The art in the series is a wonderful
combination of gritty present meets classic retro. I love the color palette and
the numerous variant covers depicting young and older selves of the classic
X-Men as well as the stunning confrontation between young and old Scott Summers
and Hank McCoy were stunning tributes to the Marvel Mutants. I am excited about
this series and cannot wait to read volume 2 as well as finally read AVX!
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
stars.
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