What They Were Promised

     For the first time in his run, Matt Fraction truly seems to have some good ideas for the new Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia crossover.  It’s stemming logically from the current situation of the X-Men in San Francisco and Norman Osborn’s rise to power in Dark Reign.  Simon Trask and his Humanity Now! coalition march to San Francisco in order to fight for legislation to “humanely” restrict mutant reproductive rights.  Beast, Northstar, Dazzler, Pixie, Hellion, and other mutants likewise exercise their own rights, and fighting breaks out.  It gets so bad that the police can’t handle it, and Norman Osborn declares martial law on the San Francisco Bay Area.  He sends in the Dark Avengers and calls up Emma Frost to lead a new team that will act as the leaders of mutantkind: the Dark X-Men.  This team will include her, Mimic, Cloak and Dagger, Weapon Omega, Wolverine (Daken), and Mystique pretending to be Professor X.  Emma also brings in Namor as an eighth member.  They start doing their thing as government-sanctioned mutant police when Hellion decides to break a curfew, and Cyclops realizes that a confrontation is inevitable.

     This is all quite interesting.  Norman Osborn using the image of Professor Xavier to win legitimacy and public support.  The Dark X-Men team.  The “radical poles” of Cyclops and Simon Trask.  It’s both highly political and steeped in current Marvel Universe affairs.  And as many people have noted, Proposition X, the restrictions of mutant reproduction rights, is a lot like the now infamous and widely hated Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage.  The metaphor of gay people as mutants is a time-honored one, but this new iteration of it is more modern and therefore feels fresher.  Matt Fraction does some great work with the Dark Avengers, especially with Hawkeye, one of the characters who has been somewhat left behind by Brian Michael Bendis.  I love the reference that Daken makes to Chez Panisse, and I myself have eaten there on more than one occasion.  He’s right about how good it is.

     Another thing is that, in this issue, Matt Fraction gets to really show what the characters are like rather than see them in his usual generic fashion.  He gets Hellion’s disrespect for authority especially.  Other characters, like Mercury and Surge, are still lost in his genericization treatment, but this issue is a step in the right direction.  I’m also very curious as to where the Dark X-Men concept goes.  I love Emma and Scott as a couple (even though Emma is more than a bit of a slut), so I don’t like the rupture.  However, in practice, this is quite intriguing.  Marc Silvestri is someone who I wish was the full-time artist on Uncanny X-Men.  His work is 95% in the top tier of all of comic bookdom, and the other 5% is still better than almost everything else.  It’s sharp, it’s clean, and it’s pretty.  Fortunately, Greg Land will not be working on this arc.  In fact, with the three artists lined up, poor Terry Dodson is actually the worst of them.  His women often look a bit too much alike, even if they are absolutely beautiful.  But you know that when Terry and Rachel Dodson are the worst in an art team that everything will be all right.  This is one of the best stories I’ve read from the X-Men in a long time, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Plot: 9.0      Art: 9.3      Dialogue: 8.9      Overall: 9.1

Back to the Past

     This fun little issue of Uncanny X-Men sees Beast, Psylocke, Angel, Dr. Nemesis, and the rest of the X-Club travel to the early years of the 20th century in order to get a genetic sample from Nemesis’ parents to try and figure out what causes the X-Gene to surface.  Now, it hasn’t really been clear as to whether or not Nemesis is a mutant, but I think he would have to be in order for this research to be useful.  At any rate, his parents are working on some sort of clean energy alternative, and they’re being financed by that era’s Hellfire Club.  The Hellfire Club tries to steal it from them, but they fail.  His father succeeds in completing the machine, and the Hellfire Club uses it to power an archaic Sentinel in order to defeat Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Overman, otherwise known in the Marvel Universe as a mutant.  The X-Club defeats it and inadvertantly cause the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  However, they do get the blood samples, though not without loss.

     This was a cute story that was primarily geared towards shedding light on Dr. Nemesis.  He’s abrasive and generally unpleasant, and he’s one of the only characters that Matt Fraction consistently writes well, along with Beast, Cyclops, Wolverine, and maybe Pixie.  Since Beast and Dr. Nemesis were probably the two featured characters in this issue, he did very well.  He also did very well with all the characters from the past, but basically all of them were either his invention or characters that had little work done on them upon which he was expanding.  He wrote Angel fairly well, and most of the other characters were mostly background.  So again, this story was very fun.  And I’m not a fan of the X-Men’s constant time romps.  Also, Yanick Paquette proved that his work on Young X-Men was his worst work, as this issue was actually quite well done.  The faces weren’t freakish looking, and the women often actually looked beautiful.  Even Beast looked pretty dang good most of the time.  This is the calm before the storm that is Utopia, and I’m glad that we get a nice little story to bridge the gap between two major arcs.

Plot: 8.7      Art: 8.5      Dialogue: 8.6      Overall: 8.6