Back in the 1960's the X-Men was considered one of the less-successful of Stan and Jack's ideas. A team of teenagers born with mutant abilities led by the wheelchair-bound Professor X against the forces of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the X-Men was unique due to its school-based setting. This uniqueness, however, would not succeed in keeping sales figures steady so it was decided to shake things up by getting rid of the old guard and introducing new blood. Giant Size X-Men #1 remains one of the most successful experiments in comic books and forever changed the popularity of the series.
In recent years, the X-Men's popularity has waned somewhat as Marvel Editorial has struggled to find a stable and popular footing. A string of 'event' stories from Messiah CompleX to Utopia to Second Coming and now Schism have each resounded with fans and received mainly positive responses, but even so things are not as they should be in the house of X. The Avengers are the current heavy hitters of the Marvel Universe with so many spin-offs it's impossible to tell what to read. The X-Men, meanwhile has relaunched an Ultimate Comics version, a new title simply called X-Men and a hit movie that took many by surprise.
The solution to the lack of excitement over the merry mutants was to split the team in half. A schism in the two elder statesmen of the team has led to two distinct points of view on where the X-Men should be headed. After surviving near-extinction several times over, Cyclops has developed into a General more than a teacher and hero and frankly who can blame him? One of the main attractions to the X-Men series for me has been the tenacious ability to overcome impossible odds and an unending string of disasters. It's about time they got pro-active.
However, the move toward a more militant approach by Cyclops shows Wolverine a side to his personality that even he never suspected. When the anarchist psychic Quentin Quire attacks a global arms summit, Sentinels are put into action all over the globe. What's worse is that the Sentinels are faulty and attack humans and mutants alike. As the X-Men struggle to fight a planet-wide crisis, they are simultaneously hated and feared by the humans that they are protecting. None of this, after all, would have happened without the mutant attack on arms summit.
To make matters worse, the new Hellfire Club (made up of young heirs to the founding members) have assassinated their elders and attacked a team of X-Men using alien technology, taking out their heavy hitters in one fell swoop.
When a Sentinel confined in a suitcase explodes and reconstructs into a massive robotic monster, the X-Men are unable to recall their forces to meet the threat. This prompts the schism in leadership as Cyclops decides to stay and fight using the young mutants still on Utopia and Wolverine decides that they should run. The moment is incredibly strange and very out of character for Wolverine, to be honest.
Cyclops has the benefit of years of back story steadily developing him into the man we see facing a mountain-sized Sentinel with an army of kids, but since when did Wolverine become so compassionate? The answer may lie in his role as leader of X-Force as he engaged in several black operations killing villains that posed a threat to the mutant race and the loss of Nightcrawler. Both events may have shown Logan that being 'the best there is' at killing may not be serving the people he wants to protect. There was once a time when Storm or Cyclops would chide Wolverine for using excessive force. But these days he was being called upon to kill without discrimination by Cyclops (and Magneto too... weird). Something was broken in the heart of the X-Men family and it needed to be healed.
That's my best guess, but it would have been nice to see this addressed by the comic Regenesis which hit the stands yesterday. Re-establishing the X-Men universe into two camps, Regenesis was an over-sized one-shot that promised to shed more light on the split in the X-Men's ranks and why each member of the team chose to side with whoever they sided with.
... not exactly.
When the dust settles from the X-Men's Schism, a line has been drawn, and every mutant must choose. Who will they follow — XXXXXX or Wolverine? Either way, with mutantkind cut in two, things will never be the same. Setting the stage for this month's WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN #1 and November's all-new UNCANNY X-MEN #1, Kieron Gillen (UNCANNY X-MEN, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY) and Billy Tan (UNCANNY X-FORCE, NEW AVENGERS) take us through the ranks of the X-Men as they choose their destiny.
I have been enjoying Kieron Gillan's work on both Uncanny X-Men and Journey Into Mystery (a book deserving far more attention than it gets) but here he just fell kind of flat. But seeing as how he was called upon to write a comic in which every X-Men character explains their decisions... what more could he have done?
Far from an elaboration of the split in the ranks, Regenesis instead offers up a bizarre poetic vision of the split as Wolverine and Cyclops are depicted as cavemen fighting over a fire. As Wolverine and Cyclops awkwardly cycle through Utopia island recruiting members of the team to their side, a similar event is depicted in the caveman sequence as scantily-clad primitive versions of each X-Man joins one side or the other.
What's even weirder is that the sequence operates as a framing device as if the reader couldn't follow the action of the comic.
Additionally, the reasoning behind each team member siding with defending the Mutant Nation of Utopia or reforming the School for Gifted Youngsters is slight at best. I'm not sure which I understand less for instance; why Wolverine 'needs' Iceman and why Iceman joins. Was it really for the free beer? I would have liked to have seen more friction with reason as well. Why, for instance, did Wolverine and Cyclops not bump into each other on the way to Storm's room? Why did Wolverine pitch X-Factor to Havoc and Polaris? It's just odd.
Strangely, the part of the book that made the most sense focused on the Young X-Men/New X-Men/New Mutants... and who even knows who those characters are aside from me? All three of their series were canceled due to low sales yet they remain the most interesting characters in the book. Maybe Gillen has plans for them... or Aaron does over in his book.
I want to get excited about the next stage of the X-Men, but this issue really failed to get my attention, to be honest. A weird framing device, choppy and inconsistent art and uneven characterization (why was Cyclops so whiny all of a sudden with Emma Frost? Why were Rogue and Magneto laughing?) made this issue a failure in that respect. I guess I'll have to look forward to the new issue 1's as they are released.
Who's side are you on? Which of the new X-books are you looking forward to more?
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