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By Jason Bourgeois
Welcome one and all into the second year of Grey Matters, and to the start of 2006! In my opinion, 2005 was an amazing year for comics with big events that also managed to be well told. Aside from House of M. But as I've said many times, the miniseries were pretty fun. The X-Men got decimated, and in the process were reinvigorated with new purpose, good stories, and became just a little more unique again. DC is in the midst of another Crisis, and Geoff Johns is ushering in a new era of fun and amazing, epic stories over there. And Buffy and Angel live on, in comic form! Hopefully, this coming year keeps up the trend of growing comics back to the greatness we used to know. I'm a bit dubious of that hope, but things are at least looking up right now, and it is good to see a pretty big upswing over the last few years in readership and sales.
When the Decimation was coming down, one title I was particularly worried for was New X-Men. The book was just finding its groove, and everything was really starting to click with the all the characters, and along comes House of M, interrupting the story for four months, and we learn that once things return to normal, there's going to be a whole new creative team, with the writers who brought us X-23, the teenaged female clone of Wolverine.
Now, I'm fully aware of how bad an idea X-23 sounds. And yet, somehow I have found myself coming to like the character. The writers have done a great deal to make her into her own character, and not just a She-Verine. Yeah, there's similarities, there always will be, but it's really no worse than a Supergirl, or a Spider-Girl.
I bring this up, because one of the first things they revealed about the new direction was that these guys were going to bring their pet creation in. Instantly, there were cries and moaning that she would take over the book, which was a fair accusation to make, despite the typical moaning. Writer's almost always bring in their pet projects to a book they take over, to give them something they're familiar with to work with while they find their footing, and it's something they enjoy, so keeps their energy up. Fortunately, this turned out to not be the case. She's only been in a few pages of the issues so far under the new regime, and has been given equal, if lesser treatment to the other characters, so that's nice. She's in the book, but X-23 has certainly not taken over the book.
And since the book's creators were leaving, more complaints also came up about the fate of the book, but I can assure folks that the book is still of a good quality, and the new writers know this team just as well as the old, and while the dynamics have changed, and some characters will likely shift to the background a bit more in the aftermath of the events of Decimation, these first few issues have kept even the depowered characters around, for the most part, even making one of them an integral part of the new team, as a sort of trainer for the team, with his newest invention - done before Prodigy lost his powers - the Danger Cave. This was a nifty little offshoot of the Danger Room that is more of a role-playing game where the people going through it are cast as the X-Men themselves in their past missions. I want one.
My only gripe was the format of the issues so far. Each one has started in the past, then leaps into the present day for the majority of the book, and then into the future of about ten days from now. The jarring part comes when you read "ten days from now" and then move on to the next issue which goes BACK to before the 'now' of the comic before it. This was a bit jarring at first, but once I picked up what they were doing and they were giving each issue a similar, matching structure, everything made tons more sense, but it threw me out of the story at first, and I'm sure reading it in a TPB is going to be very bizarre for new readers. Now that I've picked up on the gimmick, I like it.
Overall, I give New X-Men a passing grade, and a rare survivor of a creative change. If you were afraid to try this out once the old writers were gone, trust me, the book lives on, and is just as good. Definitely worth checking it out. I've always loved the idea of having a teen of younger heroes, striving to learn to use their powers, and become the next X-Men in some cases. The main X-Men books have gotten very far away from this, and it is definitely a good niche for it in the market, and I'm glad to see the book has survived the Decimation, and continues to be good.
Jason M. Bourgeois
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