I'm not planning to review every issue of X-Men: First Class, even though they're all self-contained stories.  But it's a very quiet week for new books, so we might as well go back to it.

As always, it's a nice little story that harks back to a simpler time, even if the actual X-Men title was never really anything like this.  Iceman is captured by a bunch of cultists who want to use him to raise the frost giant Ymir.  Thor helps the X-Men fight him.  The good guys triumph.  And that's basically it.

It's a completely straightforward plot, which makes a pleasant change in a time when most comics are desperate to show us how they're pushing the envelope.  A reminder of what lies at the core of all this is a good thing.  It's not the best example of this that you'll ever see, but it's perfectly good.

As this series continues, something is becoming increasingly apparent: it's not telling many X-Men stories, in the traditional sense.  For the most part, it's steering clear of the X-Men's early villains in favour of guest stars.  So we've had a story with Thor, another with Dr Strange, one with the Lizard, and so forth.  There's even a story with Gorilla Man coming in a future issue.  Individually, there's nothing wrong with this - the guest star was one of Marvel's standard devices in the Silver Age, to mix things up by swapping over cast members.  But it's perhaps a little odd to do an eight issue miniseries about the early days of the X-Men that seems to have so little interest in the X-Men's own villains, let alone their core themes.

The series also has a rather flaky attitude to continuity.  This issue appears to see Thor meeting the X-Men for the first time.  In that case, it would have to be before issue #9, which guest starred the original Avengers.  But hold on - the previous issue was a direct sequel to issue #33.  When is this supposed to be happening, again?

Still, that's only a problem in the wider context.  I'd have liked to see this series do more straight X-Men stories rather than rely so much on guests, but it's still proving to be an enjoyable change of pace.

Rating: B

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