So, then, welcome to San Francisco.

When Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi were first announced as the new creative team for Astonishing X-Men, I had my doubts.  They're certainly an unusual choice.  After all, the title was created as a vehicle for Joss Whedon.  And Whedon was a fan, who clearly enjoyed getting to play with the characters from the classic 1980s stories.

Ells is a very different writer.  His stories are much darker in tone.  And he'd be the first to agree that he comes to the genre as a professional rather than as a fan.  Nonetheless, over the last few years, he's written a number of revamps and relaunches for Marvel, a task that he seems to approach more as a writing challenge: how can I make these things interesting?  Sometimes the result is a Nextwave, which genuinely makes some old characters interesting.  Sometimes it's an Iron Man, which nails one of his pet themes onto a character who didn't need it.

With that in mind, I was bracing myself for the likelihood of some tinkering with the concept that might well improve it, and then again, might well not.

As it turns out, we do indeed get a new angle and a new status quo for the X-Men.  It's the new San Francisco setting, already dutifully set up by Ed Brubaker in Uncanny X-Men.  That's the big idea.  Now, I don't know who came up with the SF move, but it's given such prominence in this issue that I can only assume Ellis at least had a major hand in it.

The new status quo sees the X-Men as the new superhero team of San Francisco, on excellent terms with the local authorities, and going about their business in unaccustomed peace and quiet.  They've got a new base which they're just breaking in, and they're all settling into their new home, where things seem to be pretty much great.  Instead of being outcasts, the X-Men now find themselves in a happy little refuge where they're probably more popular than any of the other Marvel heroes.

This all seems a bit utopian to last for long, but it's certainly good news to see the X-Men moving to a setting that offers a break from the unremitting bleakness of the last few years.  If the X-Men are going to cheer up a bit, I'm all for that.

Anyway, that's the setting.  The actual story is half an issue of gathering the team - in an introductory rather than a literal sense - following by half an issue of police procedural.  A slightly awkward ending suggests that Ellis is basically writing for the trade and breaking when the page count runs out.  But he does make sure to keep the pace up, and it reads fine.

Armor takes over the old Kitty Pryde neophyte role, and Storm is back from the outer wilderness of Black Panther for a brief guest starring run.  Colossus has vanished altogether, presumably to appear in Uncanny instead.  Otherwise, our cast is much the same as before.  However, it has to be said that they've all developed a tendency to talk in Ellisisms.  None of them are out of character, as such, but Ellis' dialogue has a cadence as distinctive in its way as Chris Claremont's.  You know the sort of thing - "Henry, there had better be coffee or else I will simply believe there is no god."

The last time we saw Simone Bianchi in these parts, he was drawing Jeph Loeb's Wolverine arc.  But let's not hold that against him; the plot may have been unintelligble, but the pictures were beautiful.  This issue seems to have printed a little on the dark side, apparently an occasional problem for Marvel colourists.  Consequently, it's a bit murky, but you can still tell that there are some beautiful drawings.

My only real concern about Bianchi is his predilection for baroque panel layouts.  To be honest, this issue doesn't give him a huge amount to work with.  There's an awful lot of standing around and talking.  But there are quite a few pages made up of random-shaped, overlapping panels which are at best a prettifying distraction from the story.  Look at the third-last page, for example - what the hell is going on with those panels in the middle?  And why did this casual conversation call for an ultra-tight close-up on Wolverine's eye?  Bianchi draws beautifully, but I'm not so sold on his storytelling instincts.

On the whole, though, this is a good start - not the ground-up reimagining that I'd half expected, but a snappy, direct story in an upbeat new location.

Rating: A-

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