Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artists: David Marquez, Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #6-10 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay delivers on the promise of the series’ first volume with a story that, even more so than Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men, prioritizes character development over plot. In fact, this volume represents some of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s strongest character work in years.

There is forward plot progression, to be sure, with Mystique gathering the villains Sabretooth and Mastermind for a crime spree that comes to a head in the next volume. But the real star of Here to Stay is the series’ time-displaced version of Cyclops, who wastes little time, following the events of Yesterday’s X-Men, in stealing Wolverine’s motorcycle to search for answers about his present-day self. As one might imagine, this makes for an amusing series of misadventures in which Cyclops comes to grips with the modern world as Wolverine tries to track him down.

The first two issues of Here to Stay, beautifully illustrated by guest-artist David Marquez, culminate in a conversation between Cyclops and Mystique (who this young version of Cyclops has never met). Mystique acts as something of a sounding board for Cyclops at first, allowing him to talk through the major events of Yesterday’s X-Men and granting readers the clearest access to his thoughts that we’ve had so far. But what makes this sequence most interesting to me is that it can also be read as a total inversion of Bendis’s much-celebrated Ultimate Spider-Man #13, in which Peter Parker comes out as Spider-Man to Mary Jane Watson (who, prior to this issue, thought Peter’s big secret was that he had a crush on her). The same honesty that characterized that conversation initially seems present here as well, with an empathetic-looking Mystique offering seemingly thoughtful advice to the angst-ridden Cyclops. Bendis turns that perception on its head, though, in the very next scene:

It’s a pretty surprising moment given the nature of the conversation that’s just taken place, and again, it strikes me as a particularly clever twist for those with an affinity for Bendis’s previous work.

The time-displaced Jean Grey develops in interesting ways here too, with the ethics of her newly acquired mind-reading powers brought repeatedly into question. The other three original X-Men – Beast, Iceman, and Angel – are given a lot less to do this time around. Angel in particular feels like a dead weight on this series, and despite a tedious subplot in which he fights generic Hydra robots alongside his present-day counterpart, his only real function here is to have his thoughts questionably manipulated by Jean. And while I’m not confident that the plot development teased by this volume’s cliffhanger ending – Angel’s departure from the Jean Grey School for the present-day Cyclops’s New Xavier School (and, thus, for the series Uncanny X-Men) – will make the character any more compelling or relevant, the prospect of a slightly decluttered cast in All-New X-Men is a hopeful one.

One final thing I couldn’t help but consider as I read these issues is exactly when Bendis proposes the original X-Men to have been formed. All signs seem to point to the late 1980s: the young Cyclops is baffled by cell phones and water bottles, and there are repeated references to the present-day Cyclops being around 40 years old while the younger version “looks twelve” (although I suspect he is closer to sixteen). For two and a half decades to have transpired since the formation of the X-Men contradicts the (frankly stupid) principle of Marvel’s “sliding timeline,” which would have us believe that all the events of the modern Marvel Universe have taken place over the course of less than ten years.

Here to Stay may lend some credence, then, to a theory advanced by Rich Johnston: that Marvel editorial at one point was purposefully seeding such continuity aberrations in order to justify a future “quarantine” of the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises – the Fox-controlled film rights of both being the subject of much dismay among top executives at Marvel and Disney – from the rest of the Marvel Universe. It’s impossible to render a verdict based on the issues collected here, of course, but it’s something I’ll certainly keep in mind as I continue to read this series.

Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #1-5 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men is one of the most compelling superhero time-travel stories in years. The X-Men have featured in more than a few such storylines over the last several decades, with a staggering number of the franchise’s major characters hailing from one alternate future or another. It’s become quite a lot to try to keep track of, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to characterize X-Men continuity, at this point, as being just shy of impenetrable. In All-New X-Men, though, writer Brian Michael Bendis scales back the onus other writers have often placed on the reader by effectively reversing the conventions of the typical X-Men time-travel story. The series makes no demands of us to keep track of alternate pasts, presents, and futures; the dystopic world it takes as its subject is our own.

The book’s high concept is that the Beast, in an effort to show a newly militant Cyclops the error of his ways, has brought the original five X-Men from the past to the present day. Much of the story takes place from the viewpoint of the time-displaced X-Men, thus casting a spotlight on just how far afield the franchise has come from those early issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. To the original X-Men, in fact, their present-day incarnations are often entirely unrecognizable – literally so, in the cases of Iceman and the Beast – with the notable exception of Jean Grey, who in the present has been dead for quite some time. The original Jean thus takes on an almost messianic quality in the eyes of several characters, including Storm, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde – all strangers to this Jean, as they weren’t introduced until years after Lee and Kirby left the original series. Wolverine is especially affected by Jean’s “return,” and perhaps as a result his relationship with the time-displaced X-Men is the most vexed of any of his peers.

And while the young Cyclops’s showdown with his present-day self serves as the book’s climax, it may be Warren Worthington, the Angel, who ultimately inspires more pathos than any other character in Yesterday’s X-Men. While Bendis doesn’t give him a lot to do in this volume, Warren effectively closes the book with perhaps the most heartbreaking lines imaginable in a story so obsessed with the disparity between past and present: “No one is mentioning me. No one is talking about what has happened to me, Bobby. Where am I?” Although the dramatic irony of Warren’s question will be lost on those unfamiliar with the events of Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, the overall effect is still to underline how unsettlingly bizarre the world of the X-Men has become in recent years.

This volume’s only real weakness is that the original X-Men don’t get much face-time for the first few issues it collects, which focus more on the present-day Scott Summers and his efforts to establish a team of new mutants. As such, we get various de facto origin stories for new characters taking up space in a series ostensibly focused on the five original X-Men, and as a result we don’t see much of our protagonists until about halfway through the book. Bendis is setting up in these first few issues for his run on the rebooted Uncanny X-Men, which centers on Cyclops’s new team and began just a few months after All-New X-Men. Why that series couldn’t have just launched concurrently with All-New in order to give the original X-Men more time to develop on their own is anyone’s guess.

But the real issue that arises from Cyclops’s presence in Yesterday’s X-Men is that it undermines one of the book’s central premises: that what Cyclops is doing is terrible enough to warrant the Beast’s mucking about with the timestream in order to stop him. In point of fact, though, the Cyclops we encounter here seems pretty darn reasonable; while he engages in violence against “normal” humans with some frequency, he does so without killing anyone and only in order to save the lives of otherwise defenseless mutants. Thus, while future volumes in this series will see the characters of All-New X-Men come to view Cyclops with a greater degree of complexity, for the time being their opposition to Cyclops seems pretty thinly motivated.

Like many recent Marvel collections, Yesterday’s X-Men utilizes the company’s “Augmented Reality” app, which allows smart-phone users to access extra content by scanning obnoxious-looking red boxes littered throughout the book. This isn’t the first collection I’ve encountered with this “feature,” but it’s one of the more shameless in its execution. In one scene, Kitty Pryde prattles on about her concern for the Fantastic Four when they don’t answer her phone call; the panel’s “AR” box, when scanned, takes the reader to a minute-long advertisement for Matt Fraction’s Fantastic Four and FF series. It’s one thing to do a little tongue-in-cheek cross-promotion via editorial captions – a tradition inaugurated by Stan Lee himself in the early Silver Age – but it’s another to present such content as “bonus material” that adds value to a book. (Lest we forget, it wasn’t so long ago that collections like this cost a whole five dollars less.)

These criticisms aside, All-New X-Men is certainly one of the more interesting and original series to come from Marvel as of late. Despite the time-travel hook, Bendis seems committed to focusing on characters more than making a further mess of X-Men continuity, and for that reason alone I’ll be paying attention to where this series goes.