Comic books. Is there anything they can't do? Joss Whedon's applies humor and heart-wrench, the same as any other work, to another group of motley misfits with superpowers and lack of understanding. And it works. It works so well. You don't have to know more than a periphery of X-Men lore, but it helps. There's past history--like where Colossus is and Emma Frost's backstory--that's hard to understand if you only know the MCU. But that's why fan wikis are around. All the Whedon wit and charm is there. It feels like the best Buffy episodes.

Every panel of art is beautiful and makes you think, whatever John Cassady was paid, it wasn't enough. At times I felt like I wasn't paying enough attention to the panels so I was sacrireligizing the work. Some of them look like they should be wallpapers. However it does suffer from a common sickness of "too much content" in an image to tell what's going on and too many spreads.

The writing is not all it's cracked up to be. I always wonder how much the studio dictates and how much the writer does. I always imagine the studio's saying "you gotta refer to this, this, and this that happened fifty issues ago" and "you gotta bring your characters to this point by issue 25 because that's when we have our big crossover tie-in" and "Wolverine's getting a six-issue run with some new title we're trying to promote so don't write anything with the most popular and interesting character for six months." There are plot threads that cease developing, like a mutant cure, and the Breakworld aliens.

Nonetheless, this run is beautiful. It's all beautiful. ( )

Again, I don't think this is the right edition, but it seems to be as close as I can get here. Harumph.

I know. It wasn't so long ago that I said I was giving up on super-hero comics for now. But then this came up on my hold list and hope was restored.

And not in vain.

This was my first foray into the X-Men comics, so I was ignorant of any backstory that wasn't in one of the movies. (I'm referring here only to the trilogy and First Class, I'm steering clear of Wolverine for the time being). Still, I was hooked almost instantly. Part of it was the line-up -- familiar enough from the movies (Wolverine always squaring off against Cyclops) to be instantly engaging, fresh enough (Phoenix dead, Xavier absent, no Storm, lots more Emma Frost, Beast, and Kitty Pryde) to stay that way. The plot has some terrific sf elements -- truly difficult ethical issues, shadowy government agencies, the blessings and pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

So I guess I'm in now. At least for the rest of the Astonishing X-Men arc, and then probably for some additional forays into the X-Men 'verse as well. I don't know why I didn't think of this first, before the Avengers, (cough - Mark Ruffalo - cough), but really, X-Men has a reputation for delving into interesting ethical questions and one look at the line-up will make it instantly obvious how much better they do at strong women than most super-hero franchises.

Now I just have to wait for the next volume to come in. ( )

I realy enjoyed this! A re-bith of the x-men. intelligent, witty, moving and a scary alien. ( )