Usually my articles pertain to gaming and… that’s basically it. It’s my recreation, profession, and passion. But a man can’t be expected to do the same thing every hour of the day. Recently I was given a complete collection of The Astonishing X-Men. 24 issues of my first ever X-Men comic series. I never got too into comics when I was younger. Partially because there was a significant initial investment, comics are expensive, man, but also because I didn’t really know where to start. Did I really have to go all the way back to the 70’s or whenever Marvel first got going to understand the whole story? It was honestly a bit intimidating.
For anyone wondering how this turned out, jumping right into the X-Men with “Astonishing”, I’ll say it went awesome. There was a section at the beginning that summed up the history of the mutant group up until then, and I went into the first issue knowing all I needed to know.
Not that it was particularly difficult to get into the comic. The plotline feels very familiar in the beginning. For anyone who’s watched more X-Men movies than they’ve read X-Men comics (this guy), the first arch through Astonishing mirrored, to a degree, X-Men: The Last Stand. What with “the cure for mutants” and all the worry about the government mandating it. Blah blah. The only major difference was the villain was some new character named Ord, and not the government at large, or Magneto.
The plot took some major twists later on, and even got pretty weird at some points. Points where I had to go re-read after getting through an issue thinking: “Wait… what the hell just happened?”, but I suspect that’s not all that uncommon when you’re dealing with psychic mutants that can make everyone hallucinate that they’re hallucinating (Inception style). I won’t spoil anything, but the plot’s good, just deal with that.
What I will get into are the featured X-Men. Common names like Storm and Nightcrawler are present, but they’re not part of the main crew this time around. Astonishing features Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast, Emma Frost (The White Queen, only apparently that’s a title and she’s NOT The White Queen during this series… I think), Colossus, and Kitty Pryde (aka Sprite, aka Shadow Cat… apparently she’s got a bunch of names. They mainly stick with “Kitty”). Now if I were to name them in order of how much I liked them in this story, it would probably be something like: Kitty, Wolverine, Kitty, Colossus, Beast, Kitty, Kitty, Emma, and Kitty.
Right, did I mention Kitty is a huge BAMF? She can’t be struck by anything, she threatens to phase bricks into people’s brains, and she rolls with a dragon sidekick named Lockheed (who is also a BAMF, but he’s not really an X-Man). Just to count… Kitty saves Colossus… all the students at the school… breaks into a vault that even the most powerful mutants can’t access… defeats enemies that make fools of lesser mutants…. That’s right. Lesser Mutants. Because that’s what they are in comparison. At least as so far as this series goes.
I grew up with the X-Men in a way. I did see some of their older comics (now they’d be old I suppose) when I was younger, and certainly watched that early 90s cartoon show, so I had some preconceived notions about some of them. Wolverine was awesome, Cyclops was a whiner, Colossus was uninteresting but smashed stuff real good like. All these pretty much held up (though Colossus had some more to him than I used to give him credit for). The real hallmark of this series though is definitely how awesome Kitty was. It was a real eye opener to a character whose power I always thought was rather bland. Big deal, she can walk through walls. But that also translated to a lot of creative uses throughout the series and she really showed off what a keystone character she can be.
As far as first forays into comics, I could have done a lot worse than Astonishing X-Men, I’m sure. The story was compelling, the characters were well written, and it was simply a very enjoyable, complete, experience from start to finish. The only bad thing about reading through The Astonishing X-Men was learning that there is no clear “next” book. I can apparently go in any one of a dozen directions… Obviously I need to get them all, but that’s looking, with a price of $75 each, at something along the lines of $1,400? Sounds like I’m gonna start needing to sell my possessions for comic book money… What have I started…
