Ultimate X-Men #1: A Brand New Day

There are going to be hundreds of readers who come into Ultimate X-Men expecting the perfect distillation of everything they love about Marvel’s band of merry mutants with a few easygoing changes to keep readers comfortable with familiarity and engaged by the small changes. However, that is not what Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men is. Full stop, if you’re a mutant purist or someone whose love for the property comes from a strange soul-binding to the works of the curmudgeon Chris Claremont, this may not be the book for you, and that is the best thing about it. While completely unrecognizable from any mainline X-Men comic on the stands, Momoko’s rendition burns proud with a conceptual core that is inherently deserving of the X-Men title.

Set completely in Japan, the issue follows the young Hisako Ichiki during the end of her middle-school years. Exhibiting the traits of a developing hikikimori, she comes face-to-face with manifestations of great trauma that awaken powers hidden inside herself.

The issue is rather decompressed, setting specific plot points in detail and leaving many others out for the sake of focusing the series specifically on Hisako. There is no mention of mutant powers or a special school filled with superpowered teens, but that doesn’t take away from the book’s core in any way. The X-Men have always been a kaleidoscope of representation, the champions of those with unique identities often oppressed by a status quo that sees them as threats to a rigid way of life.

Momoko’s approach to this is to take a cultural approach, not unlike Stan and Jack did themselves with their take on the X-Men, and applied this ethos to cultural norms of Japanese society rather than American. Mental Health and the culture surrounding it in Japan are something that’s treated with a delicate, often hushed touch that leaves many people shut-ins and suicide victims. It’s dark subject matter that is aimed directly at the societal stress of educational and work culture in the region, and when applied to the X-Men’s framework, Momoko has been able to explore a completely unique yet universal subject matter that is completely within the original material’s conceptual soul. Feelings of guilt, shame, stress, and anxiety permeate the book as Hisako sees herself isolated more and more as an outsider by the world around her.

As she comes to accept her traumas in relation to how they’ve affected her mental health, her powers awaken. In a world that actively shames the acceptance of mental health and prefers to push forward in ignorance, it is in her acceptance of it and herself that makes her unique. The trauma that she is facing, the death of her once best friend that occurred due to her own ignorance of his emotional and psychological struggles, is equally rooted in the same ethos. While it may be a little difficult to pin a specific group of persons to this message of emotional oppression, the fact of the matter is that every oppressed society throughout history has not just experienced physical and societal expression, but emotional as well. Being made to feel shame for their feelings and forced to express the parts of themselves that not only make them unique but empathetic as well.

This is all focused on how it relates to the Japanese youth, which is even more important to truly making the X-Men stand out once more. The team was always about tackling the problems at the time through the eyes of the youth experiencing it. The best X-Men runs and titles (New Mutants, Generation X, etc.) focus on that, and seeing as how the main continuity line of X-Men comics has grown so far from that with its heavy-set science fiction operas and pretentious bouts of governmental storytelling, Momoko’s take is just all the more fresh.

It’s quite endearing to see the introduction of the X-Men in this universe be so focused on one individual as a way of allowing readers to get acclimated to what will surely be a world bigger than our imagining. It’s the most disconnected of the Ultimate titles both to its source material and to the new universe, exceeding at being a total reinvention of the mythos for new readers to jump into without any issues.

As for the main character herself, Hisako is going to absolutely need time to grow on audiences, but isn’t lacking in the depth or charm needed to keep readers interested past the first issue. She’s endearing, but with how much emotional baggage is being unloaded in the issue, it can be difficult to see past the overwhelming amount of plot and theme being dumped onto the reader and see Hisako for who she is on a personality level. This is where Momoko’s art gets to shine, however, as her physical personality traits get to flourish and provide a good amount of heavy lifting in terms of characterization.

The story is told with simplicity and utilizes Momoko’s talents with visual storytelling to the best of its ability. As expected, the art is beautiful, expressive, and colored in such a watered way that there is not a single ongoing comic that looks anything like on the stands right now. Its dialogue, writing style, and story flow are also all very different. While many will be quick to compare it to the style seen in Japanese manga, that would be doing the book’s unique blending of both Western and Eastern comic sensibilities a complete disservice.