Yanick Paquette’s art was solid, and it was nice to see him working on another X-title after the end of his run on Young X-Men. The story, on the other hand, was less pleasing to me and just felt lazy and unoriginal. The central plot concept made little sense – why are we supposed to believe that this couple represents the “origin of the Mutant species” when 1. there are already numerous known mutants that predate 1906, and 2. the Hellfire club is already so in tune with the dawn of the mutant age that they’ve built a capability to hunt and destroy mutants (using super powered psychics, no less), suggesting that they must not be so new after all. As for tying it back to the Dreaming Celestial, well that really makes little to no sense, but perhaps it will after a time? In addition to the overriding plot having holes, numerous story moments also made no sense – like why would the doctor, after seeing hellfire club minions attack him in his own home, then turn to – and trust – Shaw with identical minions wearing the very same distinct costumes standing right there in the background? And the sentinel just looked like a rip-off of the big mechanical monster from Will Smith’s Wild Wild West. Then throw in the earthquake of 1906 for no particular story reason, and you have a very uninspired comic that barely feels like an X-Men tale at all. Normally I’d just be hoping for something better next issue, but I read Utopia and as a result am holding out very little hope for a turn-around anytime soon.
Story: 2 - Average
Art: 4 - Very Good
I liked some of the elements of this issue, but yeah I saw the nonsense of it all as well. Particularly alarming to me was how Fraction writes the Hellfire Club as being strident defenders of humanity or whatever. Meanwhile, they have PSYCHICS in their ranks, but they're all for arresting the developments of mankind at a "normal" point. Okay, they enlist telepaths, want to harness cutting edge super technology, but when it comes to mutants they decide they'd rather eliminate them rather than co-opt or become them. Sure. Because secret evil organizations are known to say "No" to things that would give them an edge.
The fact that Fraction, whose written about Nikola Tesla, could name one of the characters here "Nicola"...is just amazingly brazen to me. It's disrespectful of the subject matter. Imagine someone writing about an old scientist named "Albert", who has crazy wild hair, pretend that you're not riffing on Einstein, and give the guy a cliche hot showgirl wifey.
Posted by flapjaxx on 06/29/09 at 09:51 PM