X-Men: First Class can be a strange book, sometimes.  Notionally, it's written in the margins of the Silver Age X-Men run, but in practice it plays fast and loose with the source material.  That's an understandable choice; the early issues haven't aged especially well, although they did contain plenty of ideas with potential.

So, First Class has been steadily developing its own parallel version of the Silver Age, in which the X-Men have much more clearly defined characters, and Jean Grey gets to be a stronger presence.  In the original series, frankly, she's the token girl, and not much more.  That clearly won't fly today, so Parker has been writing her as a younger version of Chris Claremont's Jean, and given her a completely new friendship with the Scarlet Witch, shoved a little awkwardly into the gap before Wanda joined the Avengers.

Jean and Wanda have appeared in some lovely back-up strips with art by Colleen Coover, but with issue #9 they make the jump to the main story.  The X-Men's role is rather marginal in this issue.  The plot involves the recently-defected Black Widow trying to recruit Wanda for SHIELD, and not getting very far.  Jean and Wanda are both a little too nice to sign up for a life of espionage.

Given that First Class has a rather relaxed attitude to continuity, it's something of a surprise to see the Black Widow wearing her faintly ridiculous original costume, which featured fishnets and a cape.  It was dumped early, in favour of a mod jumpsuit, and quite right too.  Parker and Coover contribute a one-page back-up strip in which Jean and Wanda inspire the Widow to change her costume, but it would have been a better call just to use the mod outfit in the lead story.  After all, the Black Widow's purpose in this story is to symbolise the alternative world of espionage.  The mod outfit works for that; the original costume makes Natasha look like just another superhero.

But leaving that odd costume choice aside, this is another fine issue.  The actual Marvel Silver Age comics were decidedly light on girl power stories, even in the earliest form - most of Stan Lee's heroines had to wait for later writers to give them a backbone, and Jean didn't get one until the late seventies.  Jeff Parker, and artist Julia Bax, are inserting the kind of story that, with the benefit of hindsight, the Silver Age should have included.  It's a straight action story with characters who were horribly underused back in the day, and Parker's revisionist take on these characters has definitely done them a favour.

Rating: B+

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