X-Men Red #6: A New History

Magneto isn’t the only person scraping by with a hollow in his chest where a heart should be beating. If you read this book, Al Ewing will scrape your heart out, too. Reading this book plunges you into a warzone, one rich in blood, terror, and a variety of nobility which only seems to appear in books — and even then, it’s rare. This story opens with a human, a scientist, tasked with guarding the last surviving children of an almost obliterated village. As he prepares to fight without a weapon (either literal or mutant), he is joined by the Seat of Day, and from that instant, the battle is met.

Ewing is a better poet than 99% of the published writers who specialize in that genre— and I should know, having won more than my fair share of literary awards myself. His dialogue is superb: brief, brutally edited; he cuts you to the marrow with a linguistic turn. When Ewing is operating at his best, his deep understanding of his characters is his scalpel. He knows who they are (a basic requirement for a comics author, yet one that is neglected surprisingly often), he knows what they want, and (most tellingly) he knows what they do not know that they want. 

And, most of the time, he gives it to them. That is its own variety of hell.

Roberto, The Fisher King, Magneto, and Storm are the primary recipients of this terrible insight. Still, everylast character is touched by the light and illuminated, for us, a little more fully. 

Not a panel, not a comma, not a pulse-beat is wasted, and a large part of the credit for this shorn, astonishing beauty comes down to Stefano Caselli’s truly remarkable art. Come to see Storm kicking Eternal ass. Stay for the creepy angles of resurrection and the milky gaze of a child’s blind eye. Federico Blee’s color work is absolutely masterful. It’s getting to the point where his name is enough for me to pick up a book. When he’s working with an artist of Caselli’s caliber, he’s practically unstoppable. 

This is what you get when masters in the genre put their heads together: a brutal, exquisite book that left me bruised, exhausted, and seeping blood in a gutter. And I cannot wait to enter the fray again with the next issue.