X-Men Legacy #1
Many comics these days take too long to get going. They want to hold your hand and make sure you understand everything that’s going on in the story before they move in any direction – not this. Writer Simon Spurrier doesn’t care if you’ve got your floaties on or not, he’s throwing you in the deep end and I thank him for it. While the first couple of pages can be confusing, it all makes sense by the end of the last page. What Spurrier is creating here is a very intricately-layered story. This is one of the most unique comics I’ve seen from Marvel in a long time because it’s fearless and takes no prisoners (you’ll get that joke when you read the comic).
Artist Tan Eng Huat does a better job with the mystical and strange aspects of the comic than the mundane situations. There also seems to be quite a bit lost in the artwork for the smaller panels – the bigger it is the better it looks which luckily for him is what the opening and closing of the book are primarily made up of.
X-Men Legacy is a very unique book. It’s telling a story that you won’t really see in the rest of the Marvel Universe and given that its character is a bit of an outcast, it might stay that way for good. Spurrier and Eng Huat should be proud about what they’ve done here. This team has created a comic about a character that no one was really asking for in the Marvel U and made it a really interesting read.
Rating : 8 / 10
All New X-Men #1
Brian Michael Bendis is helming this new series and to his credit he makes each story thread inside work. It’s a very unique comic tale being spun, but what isn’t satisfying is that too much detail is put on some things while so little is left for the rest. The sequences of Hank McCoy are all too short, while there’s too much of Cyclops newly formed ‘Uncanny X-Men.’ While new readers need to be brought up to speed about what’s been going on in the Marvel U, having half of the book retread Cyclops’ ideas twice over isn’t the most entertaining way to do it.
What this comic doesn’t lack is details. Bendis pushes a lot of information and plot into one issue and artist Stuart Immonen manages to hold it all up together. His splash pages are beautiful and he also has gorgeous characters in any sized panel. The thing that Immonen does well is draw the more outlandish members of the X-Men. His depictions of Beast and Iceman looks great and that makes me wish they were in the comic more.
Bendis knows a thing or two about these characters and he is really at his best writing their interactions over combat sequences. This comic squeezes a lot of stuff into one issue and does the opposite you’d think by spending more time on plot points we’ve seen before and glossing over the new story threads, which might make your head spin. I’m sure by the end of this arc we’ll have a fantastic story inside All New X-Men, but as far as the first issue goes it leaves some elements to be desired.
Rating: 7.5 / 10
