Uncanny X-Men #475

Written by Ed Brubaker

Pencils & Cover by Billy Tan

 

I take it as a good sign that Marvel has gotten around to putting the heads of the team members on the top left marquee. It’s old school, it’s been so long as to be ‘new’ again, and it shows that Brubaker isn’t going to have a large rotating cast that he can’t control (Milligan/Austen/Claremont).

 

Beginning the first of the two X-book’s revivals, Brubaker picks up where he left off in X-Men: Genesis. Similar to his run on Authority, Brubaker immediately begins to clean up the last writer’s mess. Only he’s cleaning up Milligan’s mess from X-Men. Polaris is being hunted by an anti-Apocalypse cult, which is a wonderful idea. A creature who was supposed to have ravaged Egypt for centuries would have generated some bad feelings. Enter the new team handpicked by Professor X to rescue her.

 

The new team is made up of Warpath, Marvel Girl, Nightcrawler, and Havok, and most of the issue is taken up of Prof. X’s recruitment of said team. The team is a good mix of characters and more importantly is well defined. The team has a reason to exist and that alone sets it apart from the past three years of X-Books. The tone is a vast improvement over anything either Milligan or Claremont had going. We have a grand scope (space opera with the Shi’ar), a sure agenda (stop Vulcan), and an adventurous tone.

 

The rescue of Polaris on the streets of a city in Egypt is a testament to both writer and artist’s ability to bring excitement to a battle of throwaway characters. Tan’s pencils during the fight are dynamic and emotional, but it’s during the quiet moments that he has trouble. His faces are good enough to convey the emotions in the dialogue (especially the last panel), but his anatomy seems to be shot if the character is just standing there. For some reason, any action other than an all out exertion from the characters is drawn awkwardly. You can tell Tan hasn’t practiced too much on drawing characters lounging around talking from a straightforward perspective. I mostly noticed during Warpath recruitment scene; it’s enough of a problem to make me stop and wince.

 

Speaking of nitpicks, when did Warpath (a Native American) learn Arabic? He responds to comments spoken in Arabic, a completely valid if utterly small point. The book has managed to make the X-Men feel more like the outlaws they are in one issue than Claremont was able to do on X-Treme X-Men in its entire run.

 

Rating - 8