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X-MEN: THE END VOLUME 1 #1
"The Gathering Storm"
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Chris Claremont
Pencils: Sean Chen
Inks: Sandu Florea
Colors: Ian Hannin
Letters: Dave Sharpe
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Price: $2.99 US/$4.25 CAN |
If this is the end, then this must be the miniseries where Claremont ties up all the dangling threads from his multi-year X-Men run, right? If that's the case, no wonder it needs eighteen issues. All jokes about Claremont's propensity for long-winded stories aside, though, the weakness of X-Men: The End isn't so much what it is as what it isn't. And what it isn't is anything new. We've seen alternate futures for these characters before, and some of them are definitive X-Men stories, so we're hitting the law of diminishing returns, and it would be damn near impossible for the Claremont of today to top the classic stories that he wrote at the top of his game, which is essentially what he's trying to do here. That said, while it absolutely wallows in continuity that only the diehard X-fans will love and features some stilted, hokey dialogue and C-list characters, it also tugs effectively at my nostalgic attachment to the X-Men's alien villains and setting and features some lovely artwork by Sean Chen and Sandu Florea. Casual X-fans beware, this one is for the diehards only, and even then it's only for those who either don't recognize or can put aside some of Claremont's stylistic excesses.
One thing that Claremont tends to do a lot in comics is to over-exaggerate the importance of everything. In trying to create drama and epic situations, he creates epic melodrama, where every minor decision is a major turning point for the future of the whole universe and every character is potentially the second coming, the most important person in the universe. Now, this is kind of refreshing in a comics industry where most of the heroes are being portrayed as whiny losers whose villains walk all over them, but it also starts to become tiresome when you realize that every character is being introduced as the most important character in the book. Many writers become so enamored of the everyman concept that they make their heroes mundane, but Claremont goes the other direction and becomes so fascinated by the notion of the uberman that he removes any sense of reality or relatability from the book.
Then there's the accessibility problem, which is usually the pet peeve of my reviewing partner, but I'll go ahead and tackle it here as well. It's not that Claremont doesn't explain who all these characters are and what they're doing, it's that I can't imagine anyone caring about the warskrulls and their manipulations of the Shi'ar empire if they didn't read those mid-'90s stories, and most aren't going to recognize the slavers from X-Treme X-Men either. Personally, I'm glad to see the X-Men dealing with space villains again rather than constantly being faced with more mutants, as it always broadened their appeal a bit, but I also have to wonder if the best way to launch a story focusing on the "last" X-Men story is for them to hardly be in it.
With all that said, I kind of like Aliyah Bishop, the lead character of this issue. Sure, she's the typical Claremont uberbabe, a woman who goes beyond strong woman into being an unbeatable woman, but Sean Chen gives her an interesting look and Claremont's dialogue conveys her youth, enthusiasm and attitude, reminding me more than a little of the first time I saw Kitty Pryde. It should also be said that Sean Chen is the star of this book, creatively, as his sweeping rendition of alien landscapes and starships really gets across the sense of scale that Claremont is going for here and the flight and fight sequence with Aliyah is beautifully choreographed.
X-Men: The End has the right scale for a "final" story of these characters, and I have to admit that I'm intrigued despite my better judgment. However, the familiar themes in Claremont's work, not to mention some of the hokey dialogue that he's become famous for, leave me expecting that I'll lose all interest in this work about midway through at best. There's some promise here, and I may be surprised and see it realized, but I think it's far more likely that this issue, mediocre as I found it to be, might be the best it gets.
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