Of all the stories to launch out of "Messiah Complex", Young X-Men has been by far the biggest misfire.  This week sees the book conclude its opening five-issue storyline, and leaves me none the wiser as to what they could have been thinking.

Actually, my suspicion is that Marvel wanted to launch all these stories out of "Messiah Complex", but had decided that they weren't starting the San Francisco stuff until Uncanny #500, leaving everyone with several months to twiddle their thumbs and fill time.  That's just speculation on my part - but it's the most plausible explanation I can imagine for why this series would launch with a five-issue arc that doesn't introduce the cast, doesn't set up the premise, and doesn't really achieve anything.

Solicitations of upcoming issues suggest that we're about to get "the younger mutants move to San Francisco and audition to be in the regular cast", or something to that effect.  That would have made sense for an opening arc.  What we actually got was a false start, in which an impostor Cyclops recruits a bunch of minor characters into a new team, and gets them to fight the original New Mutants.  The big dramatic pay-off is the death of one of the cast (as trailed in the first issue), which is supposed to be a moving lesson about what it means to be a proper X-Man - but the death toll in this book's predecessor, New X-Men, was so far through the roof that bumping off another background figure means nothing.

Marc Guggenheim writes the story passably, but the concept just doesn't have much to it.  It certainly doesn't seem to have engaged the interest of artist Yanick Paquette, who turns in what I can only describe as a cursory effort, with uninspired layouts and inexpressive, sketchy figures.  Sometimes he gets to draw naked women and he perks up a bit.

By delaying the San Francisco stories for a few months, instead of jumping straight into them after "Messiah Complex", the X-books lost a lot of momentum across the board.  But Young X-Men has suffered more than most, ending up with an opening storyline of no particular apparent significance, and doing little to establish the premise of the series beyond the bare bones that are obvious from the title.

For my money, they've botched this launch big time.  A shame, because I do like some of the characters, and I've enjoyed work by the same creators in the past.  But as an opening storyline, this hasn't worked at all.

Rating: C

back | continue