Dull.  Boring.  Unnecessary.  Just a few words to describe the series of character studies contained in the first issue of Dark X-Men, which reads, not as a comic, but as a who is who of a new book. 

We begin with Namor and Osborne discussing why Namor chose to join Emma’s Dark X squad, after his disagreement over the Atlantean invasion.  The story desperately wants to be up to par with Bendis’s Namor/Sentry discussion that Bendis wrote in Dark Avengers, but it is not nearly as interesting, and we learn nothing new about either character.

The second story is an introduction to Mimic.  This is the most needed of the stories, as Mimic hasn’t been heavily used (aside form the alternate universe version in The Exiles)  in the Marvel Universe.   But while the introduction might be necessary, it could easily have been written to be interesting as well as informative, and I’m unsure why James Asmus chose to make it flat and lifeless instead.  Perhaps it was an editorial decision.

The issue concludes with Normy recruiting Dark Beast.  Again this is useful to people who’ve never read an X-Man title with Dark Beast in it before, but it’s not told in such a way that it’s engaging to the reader. 

These stories all could have fit very nicely as character profiles at the end of the last issue of Uncanny or in the Utopia #1 Special, and the reader would have been just as informed, but not nearly as bored.  The only upside is Ibraim Roberson’s art in the last story.  I”m not sure I like his work, which is fairly realistic, but it’s, at least, different from the same old same old Marvle artwork that saturates the rest of this book.