Giant-Sized X-Men: Fantomex #1: Time After Time

First off, if you’ve just had a baby, the idea of The World is fairly horrific, so I’m just going to be sitting over here, curled up in a little ball, thanks to Mr Hickman. There are some images of infant-harm which are difficult to watch. When he’s dealing with trippy, sci-fi ideas (and not writing women) he’s the best there is at what he does. When Hickman doesn’t write women, I can enjoy his work. And that’s deeply problematic. The solution, of course, is to hire a better writer. But it really seems like Marvel is seeing this through to the (probably bitter) end. So I’ll focus on what we have: a fun sausage party of an adventure, with some good ideas, a few hints about plots upcoming in future books, and nothing even vaguely resembling a conclusion.

Basically, this latest retcon posits that Fantomex has an atomically-identical twin (marked with a sigul which should resonate with memories of House of X) who is raised within The World and who spends decades (which are subjectively millennia, due to timey-wimy shenanigans) evolving and watching his kingdom evolve. In the end, he looks like Magneto, which is fun.  All of this is connected to Storm’s problems, and also with the eventual rise of machine-humans found in Moira’s sixth life. It has much more to do with the latter than the former, and similarities between the machine world which swallowed Laura Kinney et al are numerous.

The writing was fun. We got to see everyone from Nick Fury to the Hellfire Club to Grant Morrison’s Scott and Logan getting their asses kicked by meta-machinery. We had a fingernails-width of Storm’s upcoming story. We had a tonne of Rod Reis’s magnificent art. And that art was, easily, the best part of the book. The story was told in a series of trippy, psychedelic (but never confusing) paintings, which taunted and tantalized without losing lucidity. The art has ever been the highlight of this (occasionally frustratingly empty) series and it was in full flower here. It was worth the cover price for the paintings alone.

In short, this story is a popcorn read, hinting at storylines which will, no doubt, come to fruition later down the line. It isn’t an essential read, but it is undeniably fun.