X-Men United #1 // Review
Emma Frost begins the first day of school with Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. It’s playing on a classy, old radio set but it’s also playing through the minds of a whole bunch of students all over the world. The school at Graymatter Lane is a psychic institute for learning for people who have been cursed and/or gifted with super powers at birth. Welcome to X-Men United #1. Writer Eve Ewing opens a new chapter for the X-Men in an issue that is brough to page and panel by artist Tiago Palma and color artist Brian Reber.
The Debussy is elegantly energizing stuff on which to open the first day of class. Kind of relaxing, but also a bit nerve-jangling...a bit like Frost herself. She’s not the headmistress of the school, though. She’s deferred THAT role to a certain Ms. Katherine Pryde. The two have a history that goes back quite a ways. Relations haven’t been great in the past, but they’re getting along now. And they NEED to...it’s going to be a busy day in the Danger Room with both Wolverines teaching basic combat techniques and an excursion to France to offer an invitation to a mutant who is in trouble. Then there’s some concern about Scott not exactly being onboard with the whole idea...
A little bit of time in the danger room. A mutant in danger. An invitation to join the school. A cliffhanger ending. It’s a formula that’s worked exceedingly well over the decades with the X-Men. In one format or another it goes all the way back to the first issue in 1963. It’s weird to think that the basic framework of this story goes all the way back to something as simple as five heroes and a villain back in the first issue. Ewing has the added challenge of navigating the dizzying politics of over 60 years of history with the team. Ewing does an impressive job of juggling everything in the team’s history without it all crashing into itself.
Palma respectably establishes the setting of Greymatter Lane. though the backgrounds aren’t quite as elegant as they would need to be in order to truly do justice to the kind of architecture that Emma Frost would have constructed for the space. Drama is competently drawn to page and panel amidst action the feels more or less well-prepared for the page...though the Danger Room at Greymatter doesn’t come across quite as iconically as X-Mansion’s Danger Room often did in the original series.
Things are big and complicated in the extended X-Men end of the current Marvel Universe. Lots of characters. Lots of moving parts. Lots of inner and outer conflicts. It would seem kind of absurd to try to cram everyone under a single cover the way this title seems to be attempting. Thankfully...the series seems to be in remarkably good hands with Ewing. She’s done an admirable job keeping everything well-composed.
