All-New X-Men #1 and 3 (Marvel)

writer: Brian Michael Bendis
artist: Stuart Immonen

(via marvel.com)

It may be fair to say this I've been waiting for this series since House of M.  Brian Michael Bendis was just beginning his run with the Avengers when he worked on that event book, but it became instantly identifiable for the moment Scarlet Witch uttered the words, "No more mutants."

Now, half the reason it had anything to do with mutants when it was an Avengers event was that it centered around Scarlet Witch, the daughter of Magneto.  She was always more a part of the Avengers family, but the fact that she was a mutant perhaps never had greater significance than in House of M.  Pushed to her breaking point (and afterward absent from any comic until Avengers: The Children's Crusade), Wanda Maximoff lashed out and altered reality, but the lasting impact was the severe deplenishing of the mutant population, to the point where it was on the verge of extinction (this was eventually addressed with the appearance of Hope and resolved in the pages of last year's AvX event).

Although Bendis continued writing Avengers stories for years, the impact on my own impression of what he should be doing lurked at the back of my head for years.  Bendis is a writer who thrives best when he has a big subject to tackle on an intimate scale.  It's the whole reason why he's worked on various incarnations of Ultimate Spider-Man since 2000, because whether it's Peter Parker or Miles Morales, the character speaks to Bendis's strengths.  I suspect he stuck around the Avengers for so long because once it became clear that he had at least one notable idea (embodied by the New Avengers concept that officially turned the team into Marvel's Justice League), he became identified with the franchise, and he indeed made it a franchise, working on several different books at the same time.  Yet I still wonder if it was, after all, relevant to a true Bendis experience.

The difference might be seen in the first issue of All-New X-Men.  Half (at least) of what anyone knows about this new series is that it begins with a sensational gimmick, the original X-Men meeting their future counterparts.  In case you're not hep to what this means, it's literally the original team in its youth and earliest years being brought to the present.

That present is a little awkward.  For one, Hank McCoy (Beast) is dying from his continuing mutations.  He's the one who arranged this get-together.  For another, there's the whole Scott Summers (Cyclops) situation.  During AvX (that would be Avengers vs. X-Men), while merged with the Phoenix he murdered Charles Xavier (Professor X).  This had the effect of everyone starting to see him as a villain, because Phoenix or no Phoenix that's a pretty villainous thing to do.

But what's truly fascinating about All-New X-Men is that it's not just about that.  It's also about the new mutants popping up in the world in the aftermath of AvX.  Maybe it takes someone like Bendis to think of actually doing this, because as far as I can tell no X-Men writer since Grant Morrison has been all that interested in expanding the mutant population.  Yet Bendis isn't just doing that.  He's doing it Bryan Singer style.

You may or may not recall that aspect of the X-Men movies.  At the time, especially in the first and second installments (and again in First Class) there was considerable emphasis on what it means to discover that you're different and that not everyone you know before will be happy with it.  It was compared by critics to coming out as a homosexual.  That's another intriguing element that Bendis brings to this series.

The next issue I caught was #3.  At this point I should mention that Cyclops is not only being considered the new Magneto, but he's actually hanging out with Magneto these days (at the end of AvX there was even a moment where Scott is being held in a prison much like the one where we find Magneto in X2).  As you may know, Magneto has a complicated history as a mutant.  He split early from Xavier's philosophy of peaceful coexistence with ordinary humans, and for a time was one of the X-Men's biggest enemies, what we would identify today as a terrorist.  Yet his character has undergone a metamorphosis in recent years, not unlike what Geoff Johns has done recently with Sinestro.

Regardless of how you feel about Cyclops now, the fact that he's hanging around with Magneto does not mean that he's a villain.  In fact, along with the White Queen they're yet another splinter cell of the X-Men, actively recruiting the new mutants popping up.  It's like seeing the Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants from a different vantage point.

Yet much of this particular issue is Cyclops attempting to come to grips with what he's become, with help from Magneto, perhaps the only other mutant alive who would understand.  It's an important moment for Bendis to have written, and I'm not surprised that he did.  How long did it take him to make Peter Parker put on the Spider-Man costume?

Another draw for me to All-New X-Men is Stuart Immonen on art duties.  Immonen has been working for Marvel for years now, and has collaborated with Bendis before, but I still think of him as my favorite Superman artist from the 1990s.  He worked on Adventures of Superman before taking over Action Comics as both artist and writer.  His work on Karl Kesel's The Final Night is an essential event book from that period.  At the time, Immonen featured a simplistic, iconic style that I found infinitely compelling, human as well as superheroic in a way that no one else could match (Alex Ross is the only comparison possible, but he paints whereas Immonen draws).  When he transitioned to Marvel, Immonen started altering his style, becoming more conventional.  This in itself is not a bad thing, but I gravitated to himself precisely because he stood out.  Recently he seems to have dialed some of that new instinct back a little.  All-New X-Men is not completely different from The Final Night.  I'm glad to see that.  It's ironic, though, that he seems to thrive in representing the further mutations of, say, Beast and Iceman, relishing the prospect of making them look bizarre rather than human, since it was his depictions of humans that stood out so well previously.

I highly recommend you read this series, either as an existing fan of the X-Men franchise or as someone who only knows it from the movies, or really even as someone who knows nothing about it.  You may be a little confused at first, but you've quickly learn to love it.