X-MEN 2001
"The Man From Room X"
Recommended (8/10)
|
Marvel Comics
Writer: Grant Morrison
Pencils: Leinil Francis Yu
Inks: Gerry Alanguilan
Colors: Hi-Fi Design
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Mark Powers
Price: $3.50 US/$5.25 CAN |
Morrison's take on Marvel's mutants has been awesome in the pages of New X-Men, so I was looking forward to see what he would do given a little more space than the standard comic book. While there are still plenty of mad ideas and intense characters and Yu's art conveyed an appropriately dark mood for the espionage-themed story, the action and characters were a shade hard to follow earlier on in the book.
A black-maret mutant-organ trade has developed in Communist China, and led by Mr. Sublime, a society of humans who graft those organs onto their bodies has arisen as a result. An ally of the X-Men stumbled on the operation, and her murder brings the heroic and more aggressive mutant heroes to town. Good timing, as Sublime gets a line on the ultimate mutant donor, a captive in a long-lost Chinese prison.
Yu's art has rarely looked as sharp as it does here. I detect the influence of such artists as Travis Charest, Howard Chaykin and Brian Stelfreeze, with just a hint of Kevin Nowlan on the cover. Overall, though, he has his own unique, detailed style that conveys the enormity of the circustances and characters. Unfortunately, those circumstances and characters weren't at all clear in the first half of the book. We never really get a good look at Ao Jun (a Chinese military man and weird mutant), and there are some poor panel-to-panel transitions as well.
Of course, not all of the confusion is to be placed at Yu's feet. The dialogue doesn't flow well in the opening scenes, notably the X-Men's boardroom meeting at X-Corporation. Is it a problem with the script or with the lettering? Hard to tell. Morrison also introduces some radical new X-Men concepts here, or at the very least, they're new to me. I'd never heard of Emma Frost's diamond powers before, and the idea of X-Corporation and a closer link between Domino and the X-Men seemed to come from out of nowhere and left me scratching my head.
Mind you, there are other new ideas that just blew my Mind. Ao Jun's powers, as described in the dialogue, were bizarre and clever, and the idea of mutant-organ harvesting was chilling and brilliant. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more adult tone of the book, from Domino and Wolverine's no-strings sexual flirtations to Emma's attempted seduction of Cyclops.
Email Don MacPherson comments about this review, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board.
|
