NYX is an idea that's been doing the rounds for a while.  Brian Wood was going to write it a couple of years back, but Marvel changed their minds about that one rather late in the day and a public squabble ensued (largely because the artist chose to throw a tantrum about it).  And then it went back on the shelf.

Now Joe Quesada has decided to write the thing himself, with Joshua Middleton on art, and so the book finally makes its way into print.

Personally, I've never been to New York City and know virtually nothing about the Alphabet City area.  So despite the fairly obvious hint in the series title that something peculiarly New York is meant to be going on here, I'm just going to take it as generic inner city.  Frankly, that's how most of it seems to be written; if there are New York local details going on here that I'm meant to be getting, then they're not going to mean anything to me.  If only they'd got Mark Millar to write it, and renamed it SuperNeds...

So, taking a more broad brush approach, what do we have here?  It's inner city New York, and sixteen-year-old Kiden Nixon - Kid for short - is the second child in a single-parent family.  It's single parent because her father, a police officer, was shot in front of her in a flashback on page four.  It's not desperately clear why, so either it's a generic cop shooting or it's a subplot that we'll be getting back to later on.

And yes, her name really is "Kid Nixon."

Regardless, Kiden spends most of the issue drifting around her supporting cast in a manner that generally establishes her as a Tough Kid With A Heart Of Gold.  Up until her mutant powers come out at the end.  It's alright.  It's not spectacular.  So far as the writing goes, it's all reasonably rounded, but there's nothing here we haven't seen before.

The selling point of the series is the art from Josh Middleton.  Middleton's a curious choice for this book, since his speciality is a sort of fragile, willowy beauty.  That's not the sort of style that immediately springs to mind for a book about grimness in the inner city.  However, it works better than you might think.  So many stories in this setting have been rendered in grey and black that it makes a pleasant change to see it illustrated in clean lines and pastel colours.  It does, at least, gently lead the audience out of the stock reactions - even if the basic story is the same as ever.

The closing sequence doesn't really work for me.  Kiden's power is, apparently, to freeze time and wander around while everyone else is frozen.  That's a tricky idea to get across in comics, because every panel is already a frozen moment in time.  Because the camera angle keeps changing, the point doesn't come across as clearly as it might.

Anyhow.  What we have here is an okay story which is, thus far, a slightly above average treatment of very familiar themes.  The art is good enough to raise it up from that.  It's not a desperately memorable first issue, but I'll give it a few months before making a final judgment.

Rating: B

back | continue