X-Men #34: The Past is an Immovable Object

Set entirely in the small town of Juniper, Pennsylvania, X-Men #34 follows Juggernaut on a simple assignment to take down a Bolivar Trask statue that has mysteriously appeared in the town. The issue itself is less about the statue and more about what it represents. Jed MacKay makes this clear almost immediately by having two local characters argue over what Trask represents rather than the statue itself.

The idea of the statue being a stand-in for Trask, who, in the current continuity, is not around, is handled pretty smoothly. It’s used as a way to remind Juggernaut of his past and to challenge him directly, poking at his feelings of insecurity as an X-Man and his guilt as a reformed villain. Juggernaut is an unstoppable force, and the only way to attack him directly is to challenge him mentally rather than physically.

Being the unstoppable force that he is, Juggernaut just keeps moving. He spends the vast majority of the issue punching away at this seemingly indestructible statue surrounded by a force field. There is a clear unstoppable force meets immovable object dynamic here, and while that can seem rather bare, it’s used as a way to provide a character-centric issue for Juggernaut, who hasn’t been in the forefront for much of Jed MacKay’s X-Men.

The artwork in issue #34 fluctuates between both immersive detail and generic filler background elements from page to page throughout the issue. The characters have the infamous Greg Land smile, and each of the character designs has a Land quality to them. Panel layout in the issue is used very well. Certain pages overlay characters in the foreground over the panel grid itself, and some use slanted panels to narrow the pacing of an individual scene compared to another character’s lengthy speech on the morality of Trask or mutants.

While the special effects from cool superpowers are limited in #34, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo’s colors bring them out when they’re on the page. The iridescent force field around the Trask statue, for instance, is sharply colored, and each of the characters is shaded in hues dynamic to the lighting of the scene as the story shifts from day to night less than halfway through.