It's another quiet week for new X-Men stories, but fortunately, X-Men: First Class is there with another self-contained issue.

Although First Class is miles away from the tone of the 1960s comics, it does read like the product of a more relaxed, simpler time.  This issue, our heroes are vexed when X-Men impersonators do nasty things to damage their reputations.  In fact, the impersonators are a group of young, low-ranking Skrulls, who end up rather liking the X-Men instead of killing them.

It's not a bad concept, but it doesn't quite come across.  The parallels between the Skrulls and the X-Men aren't strong enough - after all, they're soldiers in an invading army - but we're invited to consider them as opposite sides of the same coin.  And the story peters out rather than resolving itself properly.  It's still entirely readable, but judged on the strength of the story, it's not one of the better issues.

However, it has two other things going for it.

First, the scenes of the fake X-Men in action are drawn by Paul Smith.  Anything drawn by Paul Smith is great.  It's a law.  He's a good choice of artist for a story like this, with a clean, direct style.

Second, First Class finally gets around to dealing with one of the most problematic features of the early X-Men stories - something so crashingly 1960s that it's hard to imagine how on earth you could drag it forward in time to fit with current continuity (which would presumably place this story somewhere in the mid-90s).  Yes, it's the Coffee-a-Go-Go.

For those readers who might not be familiar with this backwater of X-Men continuity, the Coffee-a-Go-Go was the X-Men's favourite hangout in the mid-sixties.  It was a beatnik coffee shop in Greenwich Village, where the teenage X-Men would sit around in their awful checked suits, and listen to avant garde jazz.  To experience the Coffee-a-Go-Go at its demented finest, just look at X-Men #14, where just one panel manages to include the lines "Those tender sentiments do wonders for my libido!" and "Cool it, chick - you're melting my bongos!"

To put it mildly, the Coffee-a-Go-Go resists updating.  It was downright weird even at the time - clearly Lee and Kirby were making jokes both at the expense of the beatniks, but also at their own uptight, besuited teenagers.

Rather cleverly, Jeff Parker charges the problem head-on, by giving us a cafe that manages to be, at the same time, the exact modern descendent of the Coffee-a-Go-Go, and yet nothing like it at all.  This, after all, is a time when "Greenwich Village coffee shop" meant "the bit with the sofa on Friends."  And so it's now the Coffee-@-Go-Go, an internet cafe where Zelda the barista sells decaf lattes, and there's a handful of people in the far back corner who quite like alternative music.

If you don't know the sixties stories, it's just a cafe and the joke will fly over your head without impeding your enjoyment of the story in the first place.  But if you do, it's a very cute piece of subtext.  I laughed out loud.

The story itself is a bit too shaky for me to go overboard with this one... but I enjoyed it a lot.

Rating: B+

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