Let's be honest... the occasional X-Statix or Grant Morrison run aside, nobody expects to find ground-breaking, unusual comics in the X-Books these days. It's a franchise built on action-adventure and soap opera, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it does mean that there are certain types of fans who just won't go anywhere near an X-Book, and nor should they. District X is the exception, because this is a fantastic book, an exploration of mutants as social phenomena that goes beyond the homosexual/race relations metaphor and at the same time is building a very interesting story of a unique fictional community and at least one fascinating new lead character to boot.
David Hine has taken something that could easily have been nothing but a goofy concept, the idea of a "Mutant Town" in New York and turned it into something that I can believe. The conflicts in this issue don't really relate to the usual good guys versus bad guys style that define most of the X-Books, but are instead conflicts of human nature. Imagine all the tension that comes from a neighborhood in poverty, including disintegrating families, people escaping their rotten lives through drug use and criminals taking advantage of it, and add unusual mutant powers, and you've got District X. I only lived in New York for a short while, and not in one of the neighborhoods that District X is modeled off of, but I've seen enough TV and movies set in these neighborhoods that I have no trouble buying into Hine's vision of the neighborhood as realistic.
Forget about realistic, though, because what really makes District X work is that it's fascinating. Hine has gone beyond energy blasts and force fields with the mutant powers of the residents, going in the more unusual direction that only Grant Morrison really managed. None of these guys are going to make the X-Men, as their unusual powers would seem about as fitting as Scott Lobdell/Joe Kelly weirdo Maggott, but in this context, they're just interesting to read about. The creepy tale of a mom who becomes addicted to her son's mutant abilities with a disturbing, almost sexual energy to it, the man whose change of demeanor has caused him to expel those bad feelings in horrifying ways, the olympic swimmer whose mutations cost her her ambition and left her performing in a sleazy nightclub... Hine creates some imaginative mutations that also serve to inform the reader of the nature of District X, where mutation isn't even a mixed blessing that at least gives you cool superpowers but is instead just a plain curse, another thing to make day-to-day life difficult.
Of course, this sort of take on a book can't work if you've got an artist who would rather be drawing big-breasted superwomen blasting each other with eyebeams, and fortunately, Hine is joined in this effort by two artists who match the sensibilities of the writing. Yardin and Sicat ground their work in the real, in detailed and believable New York streets and buildings and clothing you could see walking down any city street. Their characters, when they don't have obvious mutations, look like the people you see in everyday life. Which is part of what makes the mutant effects so much more vivid, although Yardin and Sicat deserve credit for that as well. The page of the "rat" bursting is disturbing and powerful, but there's also some very effective, more subtle mutant effects like the aforementioned portrait of mother and mutant son or the mutations of a pair of tenants in an apartment building.
What's really great about this issue is that I've just gone on and on about some of the cool things in the book, and I haven't even touched on the most powerful aspect of the book, the central character Ortega and the revelation about his life that we get in this issue. It's something I didn't see coming, and it's a very emotional and effective moment that brings the narrator to life. Nor have I mentioned that Hine introduces one of the big villains of the piece this issue, and he's a fascinating character with an unusual mutant ability as well. After reading the first issue of this book, I was inclined to think that it was going to be Marvel's equivalent to Gotham Central, a police procedural set in a world with superheroes, but after the second issue, I see that the similarities are surface only, and District X really is something unique and thoroughly engaging.
