ORIGINAL X-MEN #1: A Superstuffed Misadventure

We’re bringing back the Battle of the Atom kids. The OG X-kids. Because clearly, we’re not done messing with X-History, or multiverse events. Welcome to a game of which Jean is the good Jean, which is the evil Jean and which Jean is the Jeanniest of all the Jeans.

The dialogue in Original X-Men really needed a once over; it’s a bit awkward and stilted all around. An adjectives adjustment would have done wonders for the flow at times.  The art is typical from what we have come to expect from Greg Land, with obvious call backs to his work on X-Men: Phoenix Endsong. But there are some facial inconsistencies with at time the facial design looks like an artistic rendering of a real actor as opposed to a fictional character. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.

So, what’s the story? The Phoenix of an alternate world shows up to tell the OG team of teenage X-Men that another Phoenix is coming, an evil one. How original! And they need to go to her world and stop her from coming to other Earths and absorbing the other Phoenixes. Wait. There’s an evil entity coming and the a cosmic force needs five teenagers with attitude to stop it? Why does that sound familiar?

With that premise you’d expect of a telepath without limits, bending the world carefully and slightly to her will, and all of her darkest thoughts come to life. It would have been more creative to see this world unfold at the start, before a different Jean appeared to recruit the OG X-Men of 616. The flashbacks feel a little forced, and more tell instead of show, with alt Jean….Gray Jean (no, really)… the Gray Phoenix’s narration. Her goal is to convince these children, because they have experience with their older selves, to fight this evil super powered conqueror, Phoenix.  Though one has to wonder why this Gray Phoenix is not recruiting the older versions of these characters to tackle this…as they also have experience with clones, the multiverse, and the Phoenix. Even without the Phoenix. I’m sure there’s a world where there’s a strong adult Jean who never comes the Phoenix but still kicks butt. The logic, however faulty, is here to bring the younger version back, with their memories of the future.  Does that even help them? Maybe for a minute.

The first half is a bit weak due to its attempt to get a lot of exposition across that ultimately could have been handled better with a script polish. Reformatting the story a bit, without an extra Jean Gray (except maybe at the end) would have added additional polish. However, the second half picks up a bit in terms of the art and story with Angel’s flying angles, Jean and Scott’s fight, and more. Here, the story moves. Now you can feel the stakes, though the emotion of the adult Alt universe X-Men could have been better illustrated.

But the evil Jean Grey’s powers leave quite a few questions.  The really big flaw of this issue is that we are told more information than we see. There is a lot that just isn’t well explained, and some of that can be chucked to the fact that it is a super packed one-shot. But it is trying to do quite a bit of work for one issue, and it is not all going well.  And as a result, the finale of it lacks any emotion or scale for readers to care about this version of the characters, even if they are a version of characters we already know and love.

This is less of a one-shot then it is one overblown prequel to set up another comic. It does not advance the story of the young X-Men anyway, nor does it give us any time to settle into the world of the evil Phoenix. It is rushed and stuffed to the brim, leaving a lot of questions as to how it all happened and if it even made sense in the first place.