How’s that for some clickbait, eh?
I’ve never been much of a comics reader. While I’m not fool enough to dismiss the artistic merit of a whole medium out of hand, as a matter of personal taste I’ve never been a fan of them. It’s not that I don’t or can’t enjoy them, but I always feel like I would have enjoyed them a lot better if those same stories had been presented in a more fleshed out prose novel.
The thing is I don’t really like the art style used by most comic books. Even if I did, I still think part of me would prefer that page space be used on more text. My imagination is pretty strong, and not a lot of artists can measure up to it. So with the art not doing much for me, I just end up lamenting that page space wasn’t spent on more story. It always ends up feeling a little unsatisfying, like an appetizer with no entree.
I’m not the biggest fan of superheroes, either. I’m all for crazy over the top stories in secondary world settings, but when you’re set in the real world, I tend to expect a greater degree of verisimilitude.
But as long-time readers will know, there can be a few exceptions, with the most notable by far being the X-Men. X-Men is different; to paraphrase Sir Ian McKellen, it’s actually about something. The deeper messaging around prejudice and social justice gives it a level of substance I find lacking in most other superhero stories.
I loved the X-Men cartoon when I was little, and as you may recall, I’m a huge fan of the Fox X-Men movies (not looking forward to those characters being fed into the MCU slop blender). But as much as I liked to call myself an X-Men fan, I never actually read any of the comics.
A year or two back, I decided to finally change that. Catching up on all the content of decades was far too intimidating to attempt (another reason I don’t usually read comics), but I did decide to grab some omnibus collections of a few of the more iconic storylines — Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past, etc.. I also grabbed some early New Mutants stuff, since I liked the movie (yeah, I said it) and my father was a big fan of them back in the day. He’s the real comics nerd in the family.
It was a mixed bag. My complaints with comics in general remain, and a lot of the stories are way too ridiculous to take seriously. I will also say I feel like Chris Claremont is great at coming up with interesting plots, but not good at giving them satisfying resolutions.
However, the strength of X-Men has always been its characters, and I found that was as true in the source material as it was in the adaptations I grew up with. They feel like real, nuanced people in a way most superheroes don’t. Particular shoutouts to Karma and Dani Moonstar. Really loved those two.
Also, God Loves, Man Kills is excellent. No notes there. That’s just peak X-Men.
After I’d read all that, I went back to ignoring comics for a while, but the second season of X-Men 97 (which I thought was a bit disappointing actually) put X-Men back on my brain, and I heard that they’d recently done another soft reboot of the story, so it felt like there might be a good opportunity to jump into the modern comics. Took me a while to get around to it, but over the last few weeks I’ve finally been getting caught up on what the gang’s up to these days.
This is another case where things have been split between a couple of comic lines, of which I’ve been focusing on two. “X-Men” follows Cyclops and a team of mostly anti-hero characters operating out of Alaska, while “Uncanny X-Men” features a team of nostalgic fan favourites led by Rogue. Rogue and her team are also mentoring a new group of mutant kids, dubbed “the Outliers”… for some reason. The Cyclops story is mainly focused on more big picture mutant rights and fate of the world stuff, while Rogue’s comic is an eclectic mix of supernatural weirdness, more mutant rights stuff, and character-driven stories.
As seems tradition, it’s a mixed bag of genuinely smart social commentary and character arcs combined with some incredibly eye-roll worthy comic book silliness, but nonetheless I have been enjoying these quite a bit.
I like the meta plot of Cyclops’ book a little better, but overall I’m enjoying Rogue’s comic the best. I like the back to basics feel of it; their “danger room” is just an obstacle course made of hay bales and scrap wood. I think making Rogue the new team lead is an interesting angle for her character; she’s really bringing out her momma bear side.
I’m also starting to really like the Outliers. Maybe not Ransom so much; he kind of feels like a rehash of Sunspot. We already have a hothead South American guy with a rich asshole father and the ability to punch things super hard. But the others I like.
As someone who also grew up very isolated from mainstream society, I find myself relating to Calico a lot, and Jitter has one of my favourite mutant powers to date. I’m a big fan of more limited powers that require creativity to be used well. Jitter can instantly make herself a world-class expert at any skill she chooses… but only for sixty seconds, and then she has to recharge for a while. A person who’s only a superhero for one minute per hour is a pretty fresh concept.
More than anything, I think this Uncanny X-Men run really gets what makes X-Men work, maybe more so than anything else I’ve read so far: It’s a found family of outcasts who had no one until they found each other.
There’s a clear familial structure forming. Rogue and Gambit are the parents, the Outliers their newly adopted children, and Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee take on the role of kindly aunt and uncles. I’m enjoying seeing the warmth and kindness they show each other.
This is the part of superhero fiction I do like: Good people doing good things, just because they can. Underneath the death gods and weird cults and dragons and cyborg Sentinel dogs, really this is a story about people choosing to bring a little kindness to an unkind world, and the nuance I talk about in regards to X-Men characters makes that all the more powerful. Rogue and Gambit aren’t perfect saints; they’re just flawed people trying to do better.
I don’t know how much longer this current flirtation with comic reading is going to last. I’m almost out of compilations of these recent comics, and I’m not interested in the drip feed of reading individual comics as they’re released.
I’m also cognizant of the fact that comic storylines — really any story that runs this long — eventually go off the rails somehow. Sooner or later, the Outliers I’ve fallen in love with will turn into supervillains, or get killed off by biker monkeys, or end up fighting Zeus on Mars, or some other bizarre nonsense I want no truck with.
But I’m glad I gave these newer comics I try. It’s been a good ride.
