A) Take awhile
and B) Provide a nice overview into the form, as well as the worlds and characters of the Big 2 (Marvel and DC) especially.
This is also exciting as I have, for the first time ever, a significant backlog of comics in my collection that I've never read. I'm writing for the non-expert, but the somewhat familiar, and hopefully if you're curious about comics one of these posts will inspire you to check them out. If you want to borrow something let me know.
I've decided to start with my X-Men collection and go from there - partly because I got a lot of new comics from Max recently, including a number of new X-Men issues I've never read. But mainly because this is the book I've collected and read most consistently over the course of my life and at a certain part of the run I can follow events of my life along with the issues.
1. UNCANNY X-MEN #-1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary
Published by Marvel Comics
"The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow"
The Short Form: Rachel Summers goes back in time to stop a fellow time traveler from changing history by stopping the creation of the Sentinels, but instead accidentally causes the problem.
The Cast:
Rachel Summers - Time traveling continuity nightmare from the future.
Sanctity / Tanya Trask - Future Judas
Bolivar Trask - Creator of the Sentinels
Larry Trask - Time prescient mutant son of Bolivar Trask
Stan Lee - Former EIC of Marvel Comics and stand in for The Watcher
The Long Form:
This is an unfortunate issue to start off with as it is not very good. This is from a special month where the entire Marvel line did 'Minus 1' issues - flashback issues that told special 'previously untold' stories set before the series started, all narrated by Marvel comics architect and general spokesman Stan Lee - serving as an actual character in the book standing in for the role of The Watcher (a bald alien dude who tends to show up in Marvel comics whenever really bad shit is about to go down in order to, you know, watch). If I remember correctly not many of these issues were very good and that has partially to do with the Stan Lee huckster impersonation leading the proceedings. Stan IS a character unto himself, but he has a distinct voice and this does not quite capture it - and having him narrate really takes us out of it. Is this really the appropriate place to get meta textual?
The story is really pretty simple - Rachel Summers has traveled back in time (again) in order to stop a woman named Sanctity from preventing Bolivar Trask's creation of the Sentinels - Anti-Mutant hunting robots which will plague the X-men for forever. His own son is a mutant who can see the future (but can't remember his visions) and his daughter was a mutant too, only she and her mother are now dead. It turns out that Sanctity is actually Bolivar's daughter, is stopped by Rachel, has a private moment with her father that he's mind wiped to forget, and then the resultant trail of destruction the two ladies leave from their battle cause Larry to believe his father's anti-mutant beliefs and drive him to finish the Sentinels in the first place.
So, it's basically a monumental fuck up on Rachel's part by ignoring details like apparent property devastation just outside the house of the people who's past she is trying to avoid tampering with. I think they cover that in like Time Travel 103, and given how careful she is to mind wipe everybody in the vicinity this failure feels less like a character oversight and more a way to force the ending to feel like it has some relevance.
Beyond the cheapness of the ending ("in attempting to stop someone from mucking up the past, we actually caused what happened!") and the sudden reveal of Sanctity as Bolivar's daughter (which has less emotional impact than you'd like in a situation like this, mainly because I've never heard of Sanctity before, and Rachel Summers is a mess of a character history), there isn't much to hold an issue together here. There are a lot of references to consistent X-mystery and future storyline "The Twelve" which was in itself disappointing. Apparently Sanctity will one day betray Rachel, so that's good to know, I guess. A good portion of the issue is dedicated to recapping the history of the X-men, like they knew they couldn't fill an issue on the story alone. And since this issue can't really change anything that took place, several characters are mind-wiped - so the emotional pay off of the story is nullified.
Rachel Summers is also always a terrible place to start a book from because as a character her back story is so convoluted as to be almost toxic. Her easiest description would be "Cyclops' daughter from a possible post-apocalyptic future who returns to our time to make sure her world never comes to be" but even that ignores her becoming the Phoenix, getting lost in time, going to the future and raising Cable as Mother Askani (what?), somehow coming back to our time and more time travel. This issue seems to take place after she goes back to the future but before she raises Cable. Reading an out of context time travel story with her in it and trying to place exactly where in her personal timeline this story takes place is like working on a crossword puzzle with very vague clues. Rachel is much more effective when all the time travel junk is NOT the focus because it feels a little like watching the sausage being made.
It is interesting to see a not yet superstar Bryan Hitch on this book, beginning to develop his trademark style - but he's not there yet. You would not likely see him on a book like this today. And this our is first appearance of Nineties X-men architect Scott Lobdell as writer. Given that he unassumingly came to define an entire decade of comics in the line, we'll be seeing a lot more of him.
Who Should Read This: Rachel Summers completists only, and mainly if you're working on some sort of masochistic research project.
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