X-Men #25: ‘Til You’re 90

Man, are you as tired of this as I am? The editorial department at Marvel seems to be pushing the Age of Revelation story threads forward despite a growing general sense of apathy from the fan base. X-Men #25 boldly continues this trend by making the entire story hinge on preventing Doug Ramsey’s dystopian future. We get it, we all saw at least some of the fifty issues of required reading Marvel put out last year just to understand mainline books like MacKay’s X-Men.

That said, it’s not all bad. The portrayal of characters like Magik and Juggernaut has been a highlight of MacKay’s tenure on the premier mutant superhero team. Magik is her own kind of bratty, in a funny way, and Juggernaut is a lovable brute. There’s not much page time or focus on either of them, but the scenes they do have feel like they’re just doing their own thing rather than being used as extensions of Cyclops as the leader of the X-Men.

However, some characters lack that same nuance. Quentin Quire, aka Kid Omega, is the same bratty “young mutant” he usually is; however, so far in MacKay’s run, Omega has lacked the growth of his Krakoa era counterpart. Psylocke as well seems like she’s just “the assassin lady” rather than a complex character with her own motivations and growth.

Most readers, myself included, would’ve preferred to have Cyclops be out of all other titles for the five-month run of his own solo title, which might have boosted the sales of his limited series. Granted, this would have slowed down the already molasses-like pacing of the whole Age of Revelation epilogue meets Shadows of Tomorrow ordeal, but I dare say a short reprieve from this very heavy storyline would have been a welcome change to many readers.

A problem that arises when having a character in multiple books at once is the ever-present artistic comparisons. Being the focus of that title, Cyclops’ design and the visual effect of his superpower are given much more detail in his own run compared to Tony S. Daniel and Mark Morales’s work in X-Men. The same could be said for Magik, as her design in “Magik & Colossus #1“ had more detail, specifically in the detail of her stepping discs and soulsword, which are kept mostly off page here, which feels like some Hollywood budget-cutting move. This isn’t a glaring flaw of the comic or the art itself, since the art team has significantly more characters to draw and can’t focus as much on just one of them, but it still invites more negative attention from readers and builds into the apathy around many of the X titles right now.

On a more favorable note, Fernando Sifuentes-Sujo’s color work is always fantastic. Despite having a full dance card of superpowered characters and explosive collisions to draw, they never drop the ball in this issue. Juggernaut slamming into the front of a military-grade vehicle should feel like sudden escalation and carnage. The art team already does frame this specific scene very well, but it’s Sifuentes-Sujo’s colors that texturize the self-disassembling metallic debris as it’s flung towards either side of the page.

Spoiler Warning: There will be a few explicit spoilers for issue #25 of Jed MacKay’s X-Men beyond this point.

The reveal of the new director of O*N*E (Office of National Emergency) was a bit of a letdown in this issue. On one hand, it’s the first appearance of Frank Bohannan, aka the Crimson Commando, in over ten years. And on the other, using Frank as the new director of O*N*E just seems like some sort of nostalgia bait for all eleven Crimson Commando fans.

Now, if you have no idea who this is, no one can really blame you. As mentioned above, Frank Bohannan has been out of the Marvel pages for over a decade and left no major lasting impact on any of the X titles. Now for some background. The Crimson Commando originally debuted in Uncanny X-Men #215 in 1987.  Frank was later killed by Wolverine in Uncanny X-Men #539 way back in 2011.

There’s not much to be said for Frank’s characterization in this issue, as he only plays a brief, provoking role to set up an antagonistic relationship between himself and the X-Men for future issues. On the page, the Crimson Commando is the same smug jerk he’s always been. His whole interaction with the Alaskan X-Men reads like an interlude between two arcs rather than the introduction of a major villain.