It seems only fair to admit up-front that I expected to hate this book. The character of X-23 seems generally uninspired and overhyped, and the way Marvel is trying to convince everyone that she and Arana are the hot new thing just puts me off all the more. However, to my surprise, the X-23 miniseries has so far been pretty decent. True, partly this is because Kyle and Yost are using cheats, playing on obvious audience sympathies for abused children, but this slow-paced look at the birth of X-23 is so far the most interesting story I've seen her in. The bad guys are a little broadly drawn, but the protagonists are more fleshed out and interesting, and though I'm generally not a fan of the style of artwork that Billy Tan is using, I actually find his particular approach to it to be pretty strong and very readable.
So, in keeping with the "copy Bendis" school of writing that often plagues Marvel these days, the first issue of X-23 ended when the character was born. Sounds slow, right? Well, yeah, except that this is her origin, and who her mother is and why was actually pretty important foundation stuff. Especially since we're now seeing that the mother diverged from the original plan of creating a weapon and started creating a child, and this is of course the germ of how X-23 becomes a hero and not a bad guy, she has a motivation to be heroic. This issue is likewise pretty slow, showing us the early days of X-23's growth and how they accelerated her powers, but adding dimension to the simplistic "clone of Wolverine" is an important and necessary step.
If I step back from the book a little, I can see where Kyle, Yost and Tan are manipulating the reader a little bit. We see a lot of pages of X-23 looking confused, frightened or uncertain, and it's impossible not to be sympathetic, because mutant hero or not, we're talking about a little girl at this point. Her anguish on the final page is palpable, and the serene expression she wears much of the rest of the time really makes the reader's heart go out to this innocent girl who is unknowingly being turned into a living weapon.
However, the story at this point is less about X-23, who's barely a character yet, and about the characters around her. The surrogate mother's story is the strongest one, as I fully believe in her conversion into caring about X-23, not just due to the circumstances of her past but because of the natural connection between mother and child. Her surreptitious attempts to make her daughter human give the book its most human, relatable quality. Unfortunately, the main bad guy, a young hunky scientist whose father died at Wolverine's hands, remains a badly sketched-out cartoon villain. Cheating on his adoptive father's wife comes complete with a too cheesy for soap opera pregnancy subplot, and his personal stake in torturing X-23 in various ways comes off as unnecessarily cruel and manipulative. X-23's life and purpose were tragic enough, to add in a character who delights in torturing X-23 is a naked ploy to get the readers' sympathies, and it feels forced.
Billy Tan and Jon Sibal are names from the Top Cow school, and their art definitely falls into that style. However, their anatomy is stronger than most, their layouts (especially in the martial arts sequences) are fluid and clear and they really do capture the all-important expressions of X-23 throughout. I might quibble about the random hotness of every character, and the ludicrously tawdry outfits that Sutter's wife wears, but the art team tells the story well, and they really sell the darkly horrific mood throughout. 6/10
