X-Men: Fairy Tales baffled me when it was first announced, and it still baffles me now.

It's a four issue miniseries written by former editor C B Cebulski in which various fairy tales are reinterpreted using the X-Men.  If ever a concept begged the question "But for god's sake, why?", it's this one.  I regularly complain about the overextension of the X-Men brand, which is a chronic problem by this stage.  X-Men: Fairy Tales does not exactly sound like the answer.

Issue #1 is based on the Japanese fairy tale Momotaro the Peach Boy.  The original story, in a nutshell, involves a boy who mysterious appears inside a giant peach, and then grows up to go off and fight ogres with the help of a dog, monkey and pheasant that he picks up along the way.  It's very big in Japan, although to be honest, I've never really seen what the big deal is.  Perhaps it's in the telling.

According to Cebulski's promotional interviews, the inspiration for this series comes from Uncanny X-Men #153 and Annual #8 - the two "Kitty's Fairy Tale" stories which recast the X-Men as fairy tale characters.  Certainly, those issues have always been popular.  But Cebulski seems to have missed the point.  When Chris Claremont did it, the fairy tale characters were obvious twists on the original X-Men and the entertainment lay in the way the normal personality traits still came through.  It's not just a random fairy tale that happens to feature characters who look vaguely like the X-Men; it's the X-Men acting out a fairy tale.

What we have here, in contrast, is a basically straight version of Momataro with some X-Men awkwardly stapled onto the side.  Cyclops is cast as Momataro, for no immediately obvious reason other than the fact that he has to be the leader of the group he assembles.  The story calls for a monkey, so we get a monkey who looks a bit like the Beast.  The story calls for a pheasant, so we get a pheasant who looks a bit like Angel.  The story calls for a dog, so they give it ice powers and claim it's a bit like Iceman.  And they fight some demons who conveniently look a bit like the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

It's all terribly awkward and contrived, since the use of the X-Men appears to be totally arbitrary.  It has no bearing on the actual story, and there's little or no allusion to the original X-Men characters.  Frankly, it reads as though somebody really wanted to do a series of folk stories and thought that if they whacked an X-Men logo on the front it might sell a few copies.  Which is pretty much what I'd feared.

Now, that's not to say that the book is a total failure.  If you're prepared to ignore the baffling misuse of the X-Men and treat it as a straight fairy tale, then it's certainly got some charm on that level.  Sana Takeda's art for this issue is frequently beautiful, and makes a good job of redesigning the characters.  The dog is gorgeous. 

But even on this level, the story is rather stodgy - it's full of dialogue like "Thank you all.  I shall be forever in your debt for joining my father on this dangerous journey to rescue me."  I know it's meant to be slightly stilted, but still.

Painfully misconceived, and it would doubtless have been much better as a straight fairy tale adaptation without this tedious mucking about with X-Men.  But it does have its merits on the fairy tale level, and the art is admirable. 

Rating: C+

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