PopSyndicate.com

Here’s how revolutionary X-Men: First Class is: I bought it.

I haven’t bought an X-Men comic in years. The last thing I bought in trade was the Grant MorrisoNew X-Men (great!), but I don’t think I’ve bought an actual single issue since perhaps the days of Jim Lee. I’ve read the occasional issue here and there, sampled some Ultimate X-Men trades (and oh, how that Ultimate-line experiment became a weak shadow of the thing it was meant to stand apart from), but overall I felt I was done with the X-Men. Which meant, save for the occasional Batman mini (and Punisher MAX, if that counts), that I was done with superheroes altogether. C’est la vie.

I don’t hate superheroes; it’s just that I recognize that by and large they’re not for me. The JLA and Avengers had nothing to say to me. The X-Men were different: they were mostly young, they had internal conflicts, and they fought on ideological grounds with more compelling features than “save folks from bad stuff.” But when the angst got too much—when the comics went from entertaining soap opera to me wondering (at age 13) why these people couldn’t have at least one normal relationship—and when the absurdly over-plotted crossover “epics” dominated every connected title (I still don’t think anyone can adequately explain what the deal is with Cable), I had to check out. These were not the X-Men I signed up for.

The X-Men of First Class are a little more in line with what I would have liked. These are the classic “silver age” X-Men—Cyclops, Marvel Girl, a still-human Beast, a non-blue Angel, and Bobby Drake as the young’un—in their late teens, so it’s not improbable for them to have team-ups and encounters with the likes of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, in his running-from-the-military days. The stories are simple, almost archetypal, but never simplistic or dumb. They’re simply… baggage-free. No children from the future. No psychics placed in the bodies of ninja assassins. No Blackbird. No thrice-resurrected Jean Grey. No sentient Danger Room. This is what Ultimate X-Men might look like, if Marvel was genuinely interested in removing continuity instead of just creating more of it.

The stories collected in First Class: Mutant Mayhem are short, done-in-one-or-two affairs interspersed with quickie stories drawn by guest artists like Colleen Coover, and going by this work, she should always draw Scarlet Witch. Marvel Girl teams up with the Invisible Woman to get herself a positive female role model, the X-Men get diverted to “Monster Island,” the military asks them to hunt down a dangerous weapon known as “the Hulk,” Bobby and Hank take a road trip and save some people from a hurricane—stuff like that.

It’s fun comics. It makes you smile. Jeff Parker has a gift for crafting genuinely interesting stories that last no more than 40+ pages, and his cadre of artists (Roger Cruz, Nick Dragotta, Coover, etc) make it all seem so effortless. For the first time in awhile, I understood on more than an intellectual level what it must have been like for someone living during the Silver Age to pick up an X-Men comic. These stories were brief and satisfying, the characters identifiable and also a bit weird. But you never get the impression Parker’s just winging it.

That said, I don’t know if these comics would be as charming in single servings. You’ve got a much better chance of getting a complete story in any given month than you do with standard superheroics, but all that charm and simplicity in 22 pages might add up to nothing more than an extra-sweet appetizer: worthy of praise, but not be confused with a real meal. As a collection it works, like a particularly large piece of cake. Solo? Maybe not.

Writer: Jeff Parker
Artists: Roger Cruz, Colleen Coover, Kevin Nowlan, Nick Dragotta, and Paul Smith
Publisher: Marvel Comics

4