The first of the X-Men books I bought turned out to be more complicated than I expected. I'd thought I was beginning to understand the different versions and continuities in the Marvel universe but I was wrong. I was under the impression that the "Astonishing" series was separate to both "Uncanny" and "Ultimate". However as I started reading I soon realized that this was not quite the beginning. The story had been written to still be understood by new readers, I quickly picked up on what was going on. However it seemed to begin in the aftermath of a previous incident which kept being referred to. On further investigation I see that although this book contains Astonishing X-Men issue #1, it's actually issue #1 of volume #3! On top of that it's not actually a continuation of the earlier "Astonishing" volumes but in fact follows on from the "New X-Men" series. While "New X-Men" became "X-Men: Legacy" and continues with a different set of mutants. Aarrrgghh! So as I understand it now there are currently three active comic lines, "Uncanny", "Astonishing" and "Legacy", which all have a different set of mutants in different locations but sometimes they crossover. It's crazy!
Still once I got my head around all that and learned a bit more of the back story I enjoyed what I read. The story concerns something I expect has come up more than once in it's forty year history, a cure for the mutant problem. In fact I've just read (only on wikipedia) that some of this story was the base for the X-Men 3 film. To an X-Men noob like myself a couple of things felt a little off. First is that there's no Xavier, I think it was implied that he is dead but I might be wrong. The school is now being run by Emma Frost a character I know very little about. In fact I only know of her existence because I heard she was to be in the new prequel film X-Men: First Class coming out later this year. The other person missing is Rogue. In the first film Rogue was the new mutant who served as the audience's window in to the universe. In the cartoon that job went to Jubilee and Rogue was already a full member of the team. I have to admit that I've always had a bit of a crush on Rogue so it was a bit of a disappointment that she's not part of this story. I guess she must currently be involved in one of the other storylines and hopefully she'll make an appearance later. So for now we have a team consisting of Shadowcat, Beast, Cyclops, Wolverine & Emma Frost. How their adventures continue in Dangerous I'll talk about tomorrow.
I've read this twice now and I still don't understand all these storylines, I am very impressed that you have got your head round it at all. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI think I would miss Xavier too, the backstory between him and Magneto was to me the most interesting part of the films. And Rogue was lovely, as you say, she was the window for the audience, and it was good seeing her grow.
Hope she comes into it soon.