Finally for this week, the Marvel Next pseudo-imprint gets underway with X-23.  Marvel Next is basically a banner title for some miniseries launching new characters.  X-23 shouldn't strictly count because she's been around for ages in the cartoon, and she's meant to be a starring character in the never-actually-published NYX.  But heck, close enough, right?

Some of the Marvel Next books feature genuinely new characters, such as Livewires and Spellbinders.  That's to be welcomed.  Marvel as a company is hugely over-reliant on its back catalogue of concepts.  Marvel makes most of its money from licensing.  The logical structure of their business is that the comics create the ideas and then Marvel make the real cash by licensing them into other media.  Unfortunately, the publishing division is also so obsessed with milking its established characters that it hasn't managed to create a major new character in years.  Marvel's films are based on stories some 20-30 years old.  This does not speak highly of the licensing possibilities of current Marvel output, which is hardly surprising since it's overwhelmingly recycled from earlier concepts.  Both creatively and commercially, a focus on new characters is long overdue.

Unfortunately, Marvel seems compelled to keep one foot in the past, so their current wave of new books also includes a teenage girl Spider-Man knockoff, a bunch of teenage Avengers knock-offs (who, helpfully, no longer have anything in common with the Avengers team they're supposed to resemble), and X-23, a teenage girl Wolverine knock-off.  Still, half a step in the right direction is better than none, I suppose.

X-23 is a six-issue origin miniseries for the character, presumably taking her up to her debut in NYX.  Since her origin story involves her being artificially created, the approach is to begin at the beginning, and then some.  She doesn't even get born until the closing pages.  For this issue, the lead characters are Zander Rice and Sarah Kinney, scientists working on what seems to be yet another incarnation of the Weapon X project.

Rice is there because his dad was killed by Wolverine during his escape from the original project.  He's meant to be trying to re-create Wolverine, but it's not going awfully well.  Kinney is an amoral geneticist who's not particularly evil, just morally blind and obsessed by her work.  She's offering to re-create Wolverine from a surviving damaged sample.  You'd think it might be easier just to get a new blood sample, given that it's years later and he's presumably now in his phase working for the Canadian secret service (although actually placing this story on the timeline is less than straightforward).  Anyhow, as you might expect, filling in the blanks in the DNA sample proves harder than expected, and in an attempt to stabilise it, they end up with Wolverine Lass.

Evil scientists in the Weapon X project has been done to death, but this is a surprisingly readable take on it.  Writers Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost seem to be going for the "banality of evil" angle.  Instead of the usual cackling madmen, we've got a bunch of basically reasonable people who are just turning a blind eye to the moral issues because they're so deeply into their work.  It's a version of Weapon X I can buy into, for once.

The character angle here is that Kinney's attitude changes after she's forced to carry the child herself.  The plot point doesn't make a huge amount of sense, since we're never given a particularly compelling reason why it would have to be her, or why she'd volunteer.  Still, it's essential for plot purposes, because they're obviously going to position Kinney as X-23's mother.  Kinney is also handily equipped with an abusive childhood.  Child abuse has unfortunately become a universal writer's shorthand for character depth, but if Kinney's parenthood is going to be a focal point of the series, then there may be more weight to the theme.

Billy Tan provides some impressive artwork.  He handles Kinney with some subtlety, and gives the Weapon X project a suitably banal, administrative look while keeping visual interest.  There's a lovely panel of Zander in Kinney's office viewed through a fish tank, so that the fish seem to be floating through the room.

The first issue still hasn't won me over to the X-23 character herself, but then she's hardly in it, so I suppose that's hardly surprising.  As a first issue, it's much better than I was expecting, and raises my hopes for the series.

Rating: A-

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