X-Men #31: A Study in Narcissism

This issue, like all of Jed MacKay’s X-Men has been, is aggressively mediocre in both its character writing and visual presentation.

The team that gets sent out into the field in this issue includes Ben Liu and Animalia, who have been regularly sidelined since their respective debuts nearly thirty issues ago. It has taken so long that these characters no longer feel as relevant as they once did and causes the issue itself to feel more like filler than the beginning to a new storyline.

MacKay has had some genuinely interesting ideas, which he brings back here, such as the telepathic “booby-traps” 3K plants into the minds of converted mutants. Characters like Schwarzschild or Animalia are versatile and original enough that they could fit into numerous different stories but are consistently sidelined for preexisting characters like Kid Omega.

Jed MacKay has also been notoriously anti-Xavier in his X-Men run. Regardless of a reader’s personal opinion on Professor X, Jed MacKay consistently writes against the grain of the longstanding X-Men legacy created by Xavier’s character. Kid Omega using his telepathy, for one example, to mind control Canadian police into compliance is the kind of unethical thing that Charles Xavier, sometimes hypocritically, spoke out against.

The X-Men were created and have, for a very long time, represented outcasts and misfits. Countless nuanced portrayals aside, X-Men storylines have predominantly been about rising above while MacKay’s X-Men consistently sink near the level of the people they criticize while pretending they’re heroic for it. It comes across as being incredibly narcissistic, such as when Kid Omega outright says, “We were never going to be able to play this nice,” in order to justify his abuse of his telepathic powers. Character moments like this make MacKay’s X-Men less and less “superhero” and more “we’re different and that’s your problem.”

Those characters are further weakened by inconsistent visual portrayals. Ben Liu’s character design has changed more than once, from an older middle-aged man to looking like a teenage protagonist in a JRPG. The writing and the art both clearly have no clue what they are doing with this guy. He fills no role on the team and is just along for banter so MacKay and Daniel can fill extra panels to pad the page count. The coloring by Fer Sifuentes-Sujo does try to salvage some parts of the issue’s otherwise mundane visuals but is ultimately limited by Daniel’s art, which lacks finer details and proper visual spacing and seems to fluctuate between just decent and below average with each page.