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If you want an “X-Men” story, you may want to check out something written by Matt Fraction, Mike Cary or even Chris Claremont.  If you want a good, short super-hero murder mystery, Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi deliver a solid whodunnit for the super-hero crowd.

As a lot of good mystery stories do, Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box begins with a dead body.  This being the X-Men, it is no normal dead body.  Called in by the SFPD who they’re now consulting for, the X-Men find the body engulfed in flames and floating a couple of feet above the ground.  While that may be a bit outside of the police department’s comfort zone, it’s the type of thing that the X-Men have to deal with every day.  The corpse sends the X-Men down a road that includes both man-made and extra-dimensional mutants, floating superhero bases in China and a madman who was one of their own teammates.

I don’t know if Warren Ellis really had any inclination to write an X-Men story.  Or, at least, not to write a recognizable X-Men story.  Too many X-Men stories, even good recent ones by the likes of Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon and Matt Fraction, are about are about other X-Men stories and the acceptance or rejection of what Chris Claremont wrote 30 years ago.  X-Men stories live or die based on their relationship to the past and continuity, both cruel mistresses to all comic book writers.  But, looking at his first Astonishing X-Men story, that’s not a mistress that Ellis seems at all interested in.  Cherry picking a few recent plot points such as M Day and its certain parts of its aftermath, Ellis’ murder mystery is a refreshingly-self contained X-Men story.

In Ghost Box, Ellis is able to write about some of his big science fiction loves like alternate realities, mad scientists and space ship graveyards and it it all into a superhero comic.  Now the X-Men aren’t necessarily strangers to any of these concepts as alternate realities have been around since shortly after “Days of Future Past” but Ellis’ alternate X-Men realities bare little resemblance to anything related to Rachel Summers, Cable, Bishop or Dark Beast.  ActuallyEllis’ idea of alternate reality invasions is a concept that he’s already explored multiple times in books like The Authority and Planetary.  When you compare Ghost Box‘s invasion story to his early Authority story or even the Authority/Planetary crossover, he plays down the invasion aspects in Ghost Box and concentrates more on the mysteries that the X-Men discover during their investigations.

Heavy on plot, Ghost Box is light on characterization.  There’s nothing surprising or even different in the way that he writes the X-Men compared to how anyone else does.  His Cyclops, Wolverine and Beast as almost archetypal versions of the characters.  Cyclops is the unwavering leader, Wolverine is the fighter and the Beast is the scientist.  There’s not much beyond these characters other than what we can see in any other X-Men comic.  His idea of characterization here is having his cast talk inEllisisms such as Agent Brand referring to her relationship with the Beast as “xenophiliac experimentation” or having Cyclops refer over and over to how much they’ve been forced to grow up over the years.  There’s nothing revelatory about the characters here which makes Ghost Box much more plot driven than character driven.  That may not be such a bad thing since Ellis also avoids a lot of the soap opera elements that have been ingrained into the X-Men since theClaremont days.

Simone Bianchi draws an X-Men adventure unlike almost any we’ve ever seen before.  The Italian artist’s creates a large, sprawling canvas for Ellis’ story as he creates each and every page to deliberately guide the reader through the story.  One panel can meld or even disappear into the next panel as Bianchi designs each page to be much more fluid and lively than a standard page of comic art.  With Simone Peruzzi’s colors, Bianchi gives Ghost Box a European flair that perfectly matches Ellis’ story.

Included with this book are four short stories written by Ellis and drawn by Alan Davis, Adi Granov, Clayton Crain and Kaare Andrews.  With these stories, Ellis plays with various ideas he wrote for the main story, quickly exploring other ways his stories could have gone.  These are short “what if” stories that adds a bit of flavor to the book but, ultimately, have little impact on the main story in Ghost Box.

If Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men was Whedon’s love letter to the comic franchise, Warren Ellis’ Ghost Box is merely an X-Men story built around a mystery story skeleton.  It starts with a dead body and it’s the X-Men’s mission to discover how he died.  Blending his fascination with futuristic and fictional science with a whodunnit type story, Ellis writes a good X-Men story for the reader who may not want to get completely sucked into X-Men continuity.

Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box
(collects Astonishing X-Men #25-30 and Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box #1 & 2)
Written by: Warren Ellis
Penciled by: Simone Bianchi
Ink Washes by: Simone Bianchi and Andrea Silvestri
Colored by: Simone Peruzzi w/ Christina Strain, Laura Martin, Morry Hollowell & Simone Bianchi
Lettered by: Joe Carmagna & Chris Eliopoulos

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