The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is finally being revived, in a series of one-shots.  This week sees the X-Men's edition, intended to tie in with Reload.  Upcoming solicitaitons have Handbooks for Spider-Man and the Avengers.  The result is... mixed.

Let's get one thing clear from the outset.  The back cover describes this as "A comprehensive guide to the X-Men Universe."  It's nothing of the sort, simply because the space available is wholly inadequate to the task.  What they've done is to select 17 major characters - all members of the X-Men - and provide detailed profiles for them.  And at the end, they've wasted several pages with an utterly boring set of concept drawings for the new Mansion.  (Plus some floorplans, which are the size of a postage stamp and almost illegible.)

Now, on the whole, the profiles themselves are pretty well done.  Eric Moreels has gone back to the format of the Deluxe Edition's profiles, and they're all two or three page efforts.  Thanks to the horrors of X-Men continuity, most characters actually do have enough history to justify this sort of space.  It's a nice clean design, and the relative shortage of art doesn't bother me at all.  There are some irritating glitches - the Beast has two conflicting strength levels, Gambit's fighting skills clearly rate higher than "some training", and if Emma Frost only turned her hair and skin to diamond, she wouldn't be able to shatter, now would she?

But the histories are reasonably well written and respectably thorough.  The list of key issues on the inside back cover is a very nice touch, and a neat addition to the format.  The problem is that what we have here is a good pilot for a project that would need to be much more extensive to be worth the effort.  There are seventeen decent profiles here - but that doesn't even cover the current roster of the X-Men.  (Which tells you how bloated the roster has become, to be honest.)

No Cannonball.  No Angel.  No Husk.  No former members.  No list of past and present members, come to think of it.  No entry for the team themselves.  No supporting characters.  None of the students.  No villains.  No New Mutants.  No Mystique.  No X-Statix.  And so forth.  Bluntly, they've got a real cheek calling it "comprehensive."  It would take a miniseries to cover the X-books properly - and if they did that miniseries, in the format of these profiles, it would be a very worthwhile project.

Instead, we have a bizarre style clash.  The book is so sketchy that it only covers 17 characters.  But the profiles often get caught up in extremely arcane stuff - do readers really need to know about Jennifer Nyles, the Beast's high school girlfriend, a character who only ever appeared in a Silver Age back-up strip and a long forgotten story from Marvel Comics Presents?  Does it really matter that Rachel Summers had a run-in with the Dark Sisterhood?  Readers who want that sort of detail will be irritated by the lack of characters being covered.  Readers who want something less pernickety would probably have been better served with briefer profiles, leaving space to cover more characters.  But then, with the number of characters that need to be covered, it's a fundamentally hopeless task to try and do it in 48 pages.

The Spider-Man one might work, but this is the equivalent of trying to shove 10 elephants into a Mini - and then allowing each of them to bring a suitcase.

Rating: C+

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