Even Joe Quesada admits that the X-Men are not the franchise they once were, in terms of their commercial pulling power.  On last month's charts, X-Men didn't make the top twenty, and Ultimate X-Men didn't even make the top thirty. 

Part of that is because a number of high selling comics have debuted with even higher sales - such as 52 - but when you combine this with a load of failed spin-off books in recent years, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the X-Men franchise is just not healthy enough to support this number of spin-offs, but Marvel continue to churn them out because they're unwilling to admit that to themselves.

So, here's yet another X-Men title, to sit alongside four existing monthlies (five if you count New X-Men), plus X-Men: Phoenix - Warsong.  Jeff Parker and Roger Cruz's X-Men: First Class is an eight-issue miniseries set back in the very early days of the team.  It's only a few years ago that Marvel axed the rather similar X-Men: The Hidden Years, citing it as precisely the sort of X-Men title they didn't want to publish.  How things have changed.

But let's set those commercial concerns aside and take the book on its own terms.  And purely in content terms, there is a difference between this and Hidden Years.  John Byrne's title was very heavily concerned with continuity, tying up long-forgotten minor storylines and working itself around old Fantastic Four stories from the period.

First Class doesn't care about any of that.  For one thing, it isn't remotely worried about details of continuity.  Cerebro has the modern movie design, rather than the clunky and dated sixties version (originally, just a glorified radio built into a desk).  The costumes have been tweaked in a questionable attempt to make them more modern. This mainly involves getting rid of the belts, and putting the team logo directly onto the waist of the costume, which looks a bit odd.

More to the point, this story doesn't play off any particular events, or established X-Men continuity.  It's pretty much a stock plot - ancient creature tries to make telepathic contact with the humans to stop them killing it, garbled misunderstanding results - which Parker is using as a backdrop to introduce his version of the characters.  Future issues seem to be similarly disconnected from any original stories, which is a perfectly sensible way of doing this.

If you're familiar with the early X-Men stories, though, you'll immediately realise that this series is nothing like it.  Parker is much more concerned about developing his characters, giving Angel a curious "desperate urge to fly" schtick which is nowhere to be found in the original stories.  He hammers the school setting, which played a marginal part in the original title.  What we've got here is a comic which isn't really interested in the early X-Men stories at all, so much as the folk memory of what's supposed to have gone on back there.  Because of the way continuity developed, we all know that there was a period of X-Men history in which younger versions of the characters we know and love were teenage schoolkids led by Professor X.

Actually, the early stories were nothing like that.  The school was little more than a token cover for their headquarters during the sixties.  The only time the X-Men are ever shown doing something school-related (unless you count their training sessions in the Danger Room) is when they graduate with their high school diplomas - in issue #7.  After that, it became a book about students, hanging out at jazz clubs, listening to beat poetry, and meeting men who built suits of exploding cobalt armour.  The idea of the X-Men running a school doesn't become a big part of the mythos until the New Mutants turn up in 1983.  But it's become so fundamental to the X-Men in the following 23 years that it's easy to forget what a tiny and nominal part the school played in the original run.

But this is not to say that First Class is going the wrong way.  In terms of laying foundations for what was to come, it would have been awfully handy if the Silver Age comics had contained this sort of material.  For the sort of stories that are told with the X-Men today, this is what their early years should have been like - regardless of what actually saw print in the first draft.

It's still a series that really shouldn't be coming out when the brand is so weak.  Nonetheless, Parker does have some sort of agenda in mind - this is an attempt to redefine the early X-Men in a way that's more consistent with what was to come.  Beyond that, it's a simple, off-the-peg superhero story done with reasonable charm, and which gives the characters strong individual voices that don't just mirror the older versions.  On its own terms, it's reasonably successful.

Rating: B

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