X-Men: Phoenix Warsong #1 (of 5)

Written by Greg Pak

Pencils by Tyler Kirkham

Cover by Marc Silvestri

 

This is Greg Pak’s reward for his successful and well written ‘X-Men: Phoenix Endsong’ mini-series that helped end the loose plot thread. Now Greg Pak has taken up that thread yet again to continue the tale in yet another mini-series. This format of allowing a creator to make a mini-series outside the immediate continuity of the parent book but allowed to still matter is a brilliant compromise to the many X-book problems of over-exposure, scheduling issues, and lingering plots.

 

The last mini-series needed to be told in a way that helped wrap up some of the most egregious threads of Grant Morrison’s run. This current mini-series on the other hand most definitely does not need to be told from a continuity perspective, but Pak shows great understanding of the characters and is creative enough with the plot to make this new mini-series more than welcome. That’s all great to say but the truth of the matter is most likely a lot more economic. The Astonishing X-Men is erratically released and the main X-team is not in a monthly book—this is Marvel’s answer to that problem (think ‘Iron Man: Inevitable’ when Iron Man was coming out once every six months).

 

This is also a product of the new team-up between Top Cow and Marvel that has Top Cow’s manga-esque artists drawing Marvel books in exchange for allowing books like ‘Darkness/Wolverine’ to be made, which surely help Top Cow sales more than anything else. Greg Pak is a better writer than any of the hacks Top Cow normally employs and his better script exposes some of Kirkham’s weaknesses as he’s forced to actually tell a story rather than just draw scantily clad women posing on every page.

 

That said, he does a serviceable job but not a great one. Kirkham’s female faces all look the same and he often has transition problems when it comes to accurately denoting subtle change—Kitty following Colossus into a burning building one panel and then crying over a hurt Colossus the next.

 

Small problems of execution however, can’t hide some of the really original and inventive ideas Pak brings to the X-mythos. The X-Men have become gods and demi-gods of a Pantheon soap opera scale that had begun to leave the characters out of reach of us mere mortal readers. Pak’s acknowledgment that almost every major X-Man has had a moment of going ‘evil,’ proving that Jean is not anything unique for humanity (or mutanity) is an incredible vehicle for bringing the X-Men back down to an accessible emotional level. We still aren’t there yet, but Pak is taking us one step closer by implying that Jean’s (and others’) loss of control is simply the physical manifestation of the darkness in all of us.

 

The plot is about the next Phoenix host, and it isn’t Rachel. Her status as a host for the Phoenix has yet to be explained, but Pak isn’t allowed to play in other’s sandboxes (Brubaker’s). The plot is promising but still clumsy and clunky. We are lurching in gasps from one incident to the next without enough transitional exposition, which only compounds the art’s transition problems. This isn’t as good as Pak’s first mini-series but it is imbued with enough original thought and promising direction to keep me happily intrigued, for now.

 

Rating - 6