Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Guardians Disassembled

I would really like to sit the person in charge of putting Marvel's trade collections together down, maybe on a small comfortable couch next to writer Brian Michael Bendis, and ask them, "Person In Charge Of Putting Marvel's Trade Collections Together, what are you doing with Guardians of The Galaxy, exactly? These collections are a complete and total mess."

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the fourth volume collecting Beindis' run on the title—between volumes 2 and 3 there's the Bendis-written All-New X-Men crossover, in the un-numbered trade Guardians of The Galaxy/All-New X-Men: The Trial of Jean Grey. It's the fifth if you want to count Bendis' first arc on Avengers Assemble, collected simply as "Avengers Assemble", an Avengers/Guardians team-up that accounted for the writers first time writing the characters.

Contained in this 160-page collection are but four issues of the title Guardians of The Galaxy, plus Free Comic Book Day 2014 (Guardians of The Galaxy) #1. Plus a pair of short stories, one written by Andy Lanning and drawn by Phil Jimenez and Livesay and the other written by Dan Abnett and drawn by Gerardo Sandoval, featuring the origin story of Groot and a prequel to the Guardians 3000 series, respectively. Plus the first issue of the 2012 Kelley Sue DeConnick-written Captain Marvel series, and a story from a 2011 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, written by Dan Slott and drawn by a pair of pencilers and three inkers.

The book's organization flows okay—in terms of events, the visuals are all over the map as per usual—but it's a bizarre reading experience, as it essentially tells a single story, kinda sorta continued from Trial of Jean Grey (rather than GOTG Vol. 2) for 80 pages, and the rest of the book is given over to out-of-sequence filler material.

As for the visuals, even if you just concentrate on the 80-pages of Bendis-written GOTG material, there are six different pencil artists, and six different inkers. In a sense, the imagery on the pages that are meant to be read as part of the same story is every bit as inconsistent as the collision of stories that have nothing to do with one another (although their inclusion makes a certain sense, as you'll see; putting an issue of Captain Marvel or a Venom story in here isn't as completely random as throwing in, say, a Dr. Strange and a 3-D Man story might be. Rather, it's just sort of irritating).

The trade begins with a 10-page short from the FCBD special, in which Tony Stark sits down with Flash Thompson, who the Venom symbiote is currently bonded to, and asks him if he would be willing to join the Guardians of the Galaxy as a representative of Earth. This involves Stark explaining the Guardians and discussing them one by one in typical Bendis-ian, which is used as narration over pages of the characters in action, killing what I assume are random Badoon soldiers.

It's a short, effective introduction to the book's premise and cast, and one that adds a new member. In other words, it's a good jumping-on point, and a good story for a FCBD special from Marvel. It's penciled by Nick Bradshaw, a really rather incredible artist who was one of the best parts of the generally excellent Jason Aaron-written Wolverine and The X-Men; Bradshaw, whose very detailed, Arthur Adams-like work excels at filling panels with weird, cool-looking stuff, and is a perfect artist for a book set in space (He previous did several scenes in which Wolverine and Quentin Quire travelled into outer space to rub shoulders with aliens during Wolverine and The X-Men). Bradshaw is apparently meant to be the regular artist, but this is the only story he finishes in its entirety; the remaining issues of GOTG all have secondary pencil artists as well.

These include Cameron Stewart (one of may all-around favorite artists), Michael Oeming (one of Bendis' longest and most natural collaborators), Todd Nauck, Jason Masters and David Marquez. If you know more than one name on that list, than you also know not all of those artists draw in similar styles. Hell, Bradshaw's hyper-detailed work is almost the polar opposite of Oeming's abstracted, flat and cartoonish style; I love the work of both, but they don't exactly blend, you know?

After the FCBD short, there are the four issues of GOTG, the "Disassmbled" arc. The various characters have all split-up for whatever reason—Thompson/Venom is with Drax on Knowhere, buying space weapons—when they are all each attacked and kidnapped, taken hostage by different alien races.

It is all part of a plan by Peter Quill/Star-Lord's father, king of Spartax, to bring his rebellious, half-human son to heel and disgrace and dispose of his team. Star-Lord is taken by Spartax, Rocket is taken by the Kree and set for vivisection, Drax is taken by the Shi'ar and sentenced to death, Gamora is taken to the Badoon and beaten for information on the whereabouts of her father Thanos, Groot is taken by The Brood and Venom is taken by the Skrulls.

Things work ultimately work out just fine, thanks to some sudden appearances of guest-stars Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, who comes out of nowhere (not Knowhere, but nowhere) to rescue Star-Lord, and Angela, who also appears as a bit of deus ex mahina, but who at least was a member of the team previously—the sub-title of the second volume was Angela, remember—so her swooping in to rescue Gamora makes more sense than Danvers' appearance.

The rest of the book is all filler. The Guardians-related shorts are apparently from #14, a "double-sized anniversary issue!" (I have no idea which anniversary that could be referring to). The Groot story is interesting in its attempt to tell an entire story with variations of "I am Groot" as the only dialogue between all of the characters and for the way Jimenez draws gritty tree-people, while the other story is simply a sort of advertainment inducement to get a reader interested in Guardians 3000, a title starring a version of the team that the popular Guardians of The Galaxy took their name from.

The Captain Marvel and Venom stories are apparently there to fill readers in on the characters, although they're really there to fill up space (I know the Captain Marvel story is collected in a Captain Marvel trade, and I imagine the Venom story appears in a Spider-Man trade somewhere). Given the relatively small roles the two play in the book, and the fact that there's not all that much that needs explained about them that these stories offer that Bendis didn't include, they're kind of pointless additions.

It's collections like these that make me happy that not only did I wait for the trade, but I waited for the trade from the library, rather than shelling out $25 for 80-pages worth of Guardians of The Galaxy comics mostly by the guys who have their names on the cover.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 7

Couldn't find a good cover image, so here's this chart.

After the six issues included in this particular volume, which collects Wolverine and The X-Men #30-35, there are only seven issues left of Jason Aaron and company's Wolverine and... series (Although it was relaunched just one week later with a new creative team and a new #1). But of those seven issues, two are spent on the "Battle of The Atom" crossover, and unlike the many issue of this series spent on tying-in to the Avengers Vs. X-Men event series, "Battle" completely took over the title for a few issues, replacing whatever story Aaron might have otherwise wanted to tell in Wolverine and... #36 and #37 with chapters of the "Battle" (I reviewed the book collecting the entire "Battle of the Atom" storyline at the bottom of this post, if you're interested).

I'm not sure what Aaron does with the last five issues of Wolverine and The X-Men (#38-42)–the trade collecting those final issues hasn't been released yet—but I have to imagine it consists of some kind of denouement, because this trade sure as hell reads like a climax for the entire series. It includes the five-issue "Hellfire Saga" story, drawn by Nick Bradshaw (with inks by Walden Wong as well as Bradshaw himself) and a one-issue "Hellfire Saga Prelude," primarily drawn by Pasqual Ferry.

Aaron's Hellfire Club, a group of four super-brilliant, ruthless tweens who are in the business of selling mutant-hunting killer robots, have been the primary antagonists throughout the series, and while they might seem like an odd fit in terms of archenemies for Wolverine, the fact that they are unsupervised kids make them ideal antagonists for Wolverine the teacher, providing an example of what can become of extremely gifted kids who don't have the likes of the X-Men teaching them to use those gifts properly.

Over the past few volumes, the Club has been embarking on a gradually revealed new strategy, and in this volume it is fully revealed: Hellfire Academy, an evil opposite, villains' equivalent of the Wolverine and The X-Men's Jean Grey Academy. Staffed entirely by X-Men villains, some traditional foes like Mystique, Saberteooth, Sauron, Windigo and a version of Mojmo, and some pulled from throughout this particular series' past storylines and Aaron-written Wolverine comics, like Dr. Xanto Starblood, Dog Logan and Lord Deathstrike.

New students include young mutants Infestation, Mudbug, Snot and Tinman, although Hellfire Academy also has its share of turncoats from the Jean Grey Academy, including teacher Husk, janitor Toad and students Glob Herman, the still brain-damaged Broo, Idie and Quentine Quire, who is there mainly to save Idie.

During the Ferry-drawn prelude, we see the Academy making its final recruitment push for faculty and students, while the X-Men begin a worldwide manhunt for the Hellfire Club. And then the "Saga" proper starts, and Aaron and Bradshaw give us a nice, fun tour of this school that is every bit as big, crazy and funny as the Jean Grey Academy, only, you know, evil (Their school uniforms, for example, are less prep school and more Hitler Youth, right down to funny hats and arm-bands.

Fun fact: "Flamin'" is Canadian for "Fuckin'"

By the time the X-Men finally find them and invade, there's a nice Everyone Vs. Everyone climactic battle, made all the more satisfying because it includes so many pay-offs from so many long-running sub-plots: Toad and Husk's relationship, and where the villain-turned-janitor's loyalties really lie; Idie's seeking vengeance for what happened to Broo; the state of Broo's mind; Kid Omega picking a side, and doing so for noble reasons; and the (likely temporary) final fates of all four Hellfire Club kids, two of whom end up forcibly enrolled at the Jean Grey school. Hey, it worked for Quentine Quire...

The volume ends with a tease about Nightcrawler and The Bamfs, which looks like Aaron will actually pick up in Amazing X-Men rather than Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 8, but I guess we'll see. But as I said, this sure reads like the climax, if not the actual end, of the years in-the-making, 30-some issue epic storyline. It was a blast, and it's rather careful construction also made it narratively satisfying to read.

I'd kind of like to declare this the best run of an X-Men comic I've ever read, but I'm not exactly sure how to rate it against the Morrison run, given that Aaron's Wolverine and... was built on some of Morrison's particular innovations (like turning the Xavier School into an actual school), and that Aaron's run was visually superior, thanks to far fewer artists than Morison's run dealt with.

Whether it was actually better or not though is, I guess, irrelevant: It was an excellent series, and I'm going to be a little sad to read the next and final collection of the series, even knowing there's a kinda sorta continuation of it in the first arc or so of Amazing X-Men.

I did read the rebooted, "All-New Marvel Now" Wolverine and The X-Men #1 by Jason Latour, Mahmud Asrar and Israel Silva which, at least in title, promises to continue this comic book, but I didn't like that first issue at all, and now, a few months later, can't even remember anything that occurred within it, except that Quentin Quire had a conversation with Idie.

This "Animal Variant" of a cat dressed in a Wolverine costume for the first issue of the new series was awesome, though:

(Not sure why he didn't go with a wolverine wearing a Wolverine costume).

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I liked this brief exchange between Sabertooth and Dog:

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The Doop vs. Lady Mojo fight sure is...

...something.

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I had to Wikipedia both The Siege Perilous and Master Pandemonium; the latter of whom seemed so ridiculous I was sure he had to be a recent creation of Jason Aaron's, but I was totally wrong on that count.

I was catching up on this series in trade at the same time I was catching up with the Rick Remender-written Uncanny X-Force in trade, and it was kinda weird that both overlapped in certain ways, including the presence of the Siege Perilous, Sabertooth and Mystique joining a group of villains, and Sabertooth finding himself working with one of Wolverine's blood relatives.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 5

The fifth collection of the Jason Aaron-written, many artist-illustrated X-Men series set at the Jean Grey school highlights one of the aspects of the book that have helped make it such a welcome and engaging X-Men comic: Superhero school sitcom premise aside, it is really more of a straightforward superhero book than a Marvel mutant book; the characters occasionally deal with threats and conflicts that aren't completely reliant on their being mutants or X-Men.

That is, they don't continuously cycle through Magneto, Apocalypse and Mister Sinister as villains, or spend all their time fighting for survival against mutant hate groups and anti-mutant religious and political leaders. Sometimes they fight Swarm (at least for a page), often they deal with space aliens, and once in a while they encounter something like Frankenstein's Murder Circus, the conflict that dominates this collection, which includes #19-#24. (That's only six issues, but they're drawn by three different pencil artists, five inkers and three colorists; I guess that's the result of the accelerated shipping, and why this series is technically called "Wolverine and The X-Men By Jason Aaron" in collected form).

Now, Frankenstein and his Murder Circus are in the book because of links to other, recurring X-Men villains: The Monster is hunting down and killing all of his makers' descendants, the last of whom is a member of the current incarnation of The Hellfire Club (the evil kids that have been the main antagonists of this series so far), and the witch whose magic is powering the circus has a connection to another evil X-Men character who will apparently play a big role in the X-Men title that Aaron will spin-out of this one (and was featured in the last X-Men movie; his design in this volume reflecting that design). But it's a threat that could have just as easily faced the Fantastic Four or The Avengers; with a little tinkering to shed some copyrighted characters and trademarked names, it could have stood as its own, as an original invention of Aaron's, designed and illustrated by Bradshaw.

That three-issue arc finds the students awaking one day to a completely teacher-less school. The faculty—Beast, Iceman, Kitty Pryde, Warbird, Rachel Grey, Doop, Toad and brand-new headmistress Storm are all performing in the circus, with little or no memory of who they really are, each with an act at least somewhat related to their names and powers. As for the title character? That would be Revolto The Clown, who is brutally beaten by zombie clowns, only to have his healing factor keep him from dying at the end of each show.

It's up to the students, including the new recruits Shark Girl and Eye Boy, to awaken their teachers, save the townsfolk and combat the sinister circus.

Now that's an image worthy of a two-page splash.

I suppose that, theoretically, someone somewhere could really quibble with Aaron's treatment of Frankenstein, who looks, talks and acts quite different in this particular story than in at least the last dozen times I've seen him in Marvel Comics, although this is the same monster (There's a panel of him in his furry vest, and a line of dialogue where The Legion of Monsters is mentioned). In terms of the Wolverine and The X-Men, it hardly matters; and I don't know that the character has had any sort of internal logic that really needs govern his appearances, as he's basically just a perpetual guest-star anyway.

Bradshaw's version sure is a snappy dresser, anyway.

Bradshaw draws the entire Murder Circus art, and it's all-around great, even impeccable stuff. He's perfectly suited to superheroics, horror, action and humor, and this story calls on him to do them all—often on the same page.

While the story makes up the bulk of this volume, it's book-ended by others. The trade opens with a nice post-Avengers vs. X-Men issue, in which we check in with various players and get a sense of the new status quo. There are new students like the aforementioned Eye Boy and another who will become Sprite in the next volume; Beast is desperately trying to save the life of Broo, who was seemingly shot dead at the end of the last volume; Wolverine and Rachel are hunting for his killers; his killers are setting up shop near the school; and Kitty Pryde is interviewing potential new teachers from throughout the Marvel Universe.

That last bit is basically just an issue-long running gag, and Kitty's a little too curt to be taken seriously, shouting "Next!" like a casting agent, but it does give us the opportunity to see how Bradshaw draws a whole mess of different Marvel characters, and hear a joke or four about each.

These include, among others, Blade, Sasquatch, Puck, Dr. Nemesis, Longshot, Spider-Man, Gorilla Man, Deadpool (repeatedly) and so on (Bradshaw's Ghost Rider skull and his Sasquatch are both particularly accomplished). The job goes to Storm, though, seen here with Kitty rubbing her breasts in her crotch.

That's followed by a one-issue story drawn by Steve Sanders (wait, that can't be right, can it?), in which we meet new mutant Shark Girl, who Angel manages to recruit to the Jean Grey Academy before Mystique and the Silver Samurai can recruit her for the new villain school for mutants that the bad guys are apparently setting up.

Then, after the Murder Circus storyline, there's another done-in one, this one drawn by David Lopez and Alvaro Lopez, which is another sort of catch-up story, set after the events of All-New X-Men (Time-lost teen Jean Grey shows up for a scene with Quentin Quire, for example, and Beast's new ape-ish look is seen in this title for the first time; it's a shame, given how good Bradshaw drew a lion-like Beast). It's mostly soap opera stuff, with various pairings of characters going on dates, discuss their relationships and kissing in one way or another.

As always, Aaron's writing is super-strong, and while the art in this issue may be the weakest in this particular collection, it's not like it's bad or anything. This is the second consecutive trade to close with a shocking cliffhanger involving Broo, too.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 3

I wonder how much sense the third collection of Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Nick Bradshaw and company's Wolverine and The X-Men series might make if you didn't also read Avengers Vs. X-Men. Or if it makes any sense at all. I rather enjoyed Avengers Vs. X-Men, which I read in one big gulp thanks to some Bible-sized hardcover collection that included the entire series and the spin-off, nothing-but-fights companion series with the ludicrous title of AvX: Versus, and I imagine if one likes Wolverine and The X-Men, one would also like Avengers Vs. X-Men, but the five issue collected herein really depend on a good working knowledge of the series it ties into.

These issues don't comprise a single story arc reflecting the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, but each issue reflects a particular story beat from the series, so, in essence, these are five somewhat stand alone tie-ins to particular issues or story elements of the event series. And unlike a lot of event series, a lot happened in the pages of Avengers Vs. X-Men, so the status quo the cast of this book is reacting to in various ways changes greatly from issue to issue.

Wolverine is, of course, one of the more conflicted characters in the event's conflict, visually represented by Chris Bachalo's cover, as he's really the only character involved who is both an Avenger and an X-Man simultaneously (Beast also sides with the Avengers), and is the one character among all the heroes who had a pretty huge problem with Cyclops before the conflict even started. He's therefore a fairly big player in that series, and this book checks in with him and a few other characters throughout the tumultuous events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, at one point more-or-less derailing the entire premise of Wolverine and The X-Men (The Jean Grey School's entire staff of X-Men resign en masse to join with Cyclops' team, leaving only Kitty Pryde behind). The volume ends with Cyclops and the rest of "The Phoenix Five" still possessed by the Phoenix Force, so how Aaron rights the monthly series will be interesting to discover in the next volume.

So in the fist issue, Captain America visits the school to tell Beast and Wolverine about the Phoenix Force's imminent arrival on Earth, and to recruit them each for a different mission (Beast goes into space to try and stop the Phoenix, Wolvie joins Cap and the other Avengers to beat-up the X-Men and get likely host Hope away from them).

In the second, Cyclops, Emma Frost and Magick arrive at the school in the aftermath of the Utopia fight to try and recruit Wolverine to the mutant cause; Wolverine refuses, but just about everyone else joins Cyclops.

In the third, X-Men and Avengers are fighting all over the world, while Wolverine is trying to get Hope to the moon to...it's complicated. The pair of them fight an alien death squad, though.

In the fourth, Cyclops, Emma and the others are already empowered by the Phoenix Force, which must have happened between issues of this series, and  Rachel Grey is hunting for Hope (Apparently Rachel, who, as far as I can tell, is character sharing some of the lamer attributes of both Jean Grey and Cable, was some sort of mutant hunter of mutants in the future? Called a "hound"...?),  and there's a big X-Men vs. Avengers fight, in which Wolverine and... regular Kid Gladiator sides with the X-Men to beat up a bunch of Avengers.

And, finally, in the fifth issue, Kid Gladiator's dad, Gladiator, leads Warbird and a bunch of Shi'ar soldiers attack Cyclops and company's base in an all-out assault that goes very, very badly for them. This issue, narrated by Warbird (another Wolverine and... regular) and splitting its attention between the Gladiator vs. Phoenix fight and Warbird's origin story, reveals the bephoenixed X-Men at maybe their most villainous. Cyclops, Colossus and Magick all do some fucked-up shit to their fellow heroes and the world as a whole in the course of Avengers Vs. X-Men, up to and including Cyclops betraying Emma and killing Xavier, but nothing seemed quite so evil to me as the scene in this issue where Colossus and Namor not only defeat Gladiator, but then proceed to savagely hold him down and beat him bloody while Cyclops watches, eventually ordering them to stop when it looks like the near dead—or hell, maybe dead—Gladiator has had enough (The last issue ends with Warbird carrying an unconscious Gladiator into the Jean Grey School; Kitty says to ready the medical bay and Doop has a first aid kit, so I assume he didn't die).

As with previous volumes, Bachalo and Bradshaw split up penciling duties (each of them is inked by four different inkers), with Bachalo drawing three issues and Bradshaw two. As I've said before, both are great artists, and either would be great on the title, but their styles don't mesh well at all, and it's not merely a matter of the different ways they draw.

Bachalo's character designs are so individualized that his Iceman or Wolverine don't really look like the same Iceman and Wolverine that Bradshaw draws, and Bachalo's panels have nor borders, using the generous white space of the page to form gutters around his panels, while Bradshaw's have the traditional black-lined borders.

Their clash doesn't really matter here, as each issue reads like a stand-alone tie-in to a different issue of Avengers Vs. X-Men, but while Wolverine and The X-Men is a consistently good-looking book, it's not a consistent looking book.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 2

According to the fine print on the title page, the name of this book is actually Wolverine & The X-Men By Jason Aaron Vol. 2, a title which undervalues the artists to the point of ignoring them (which is something of a convention among Marvel's trade program, as ...By Some Writer Or Another tends to appear in a lot of their collection titles) and is at this point a meaningless distinction, since the only Wolverine and The X-Men book has been written by Jason Aaron (the distinction will become more important later this year, when they begin collecting the rebooted Wolverine and The X-Men, which will be written by Jason Latour starting in March).

I'm going to just stick to calling it Wolverine and The X-Men  though, as that's what it says on the cover (And, besides, as great a writer as Jason Aaron might be when it comes to this sort of thing, it's pencil artist Nick Bradshaw that really makes this series sing, and he draws three-fourths of this slim collection of four issues (Chris Bachalo draws the final issue).

With the basic premise of the series and its core cast nailed down in the previous volume, this one focuses on two of the teachers and two of the students, and their relationships.

The Bradshaw-drawn portion opens with the board of Worthington Industries stripping CEO Earren Worthington III, aka the now amnesiac Angel, of his power (and funds) due to his clearly having gone a little Looney Tunes, drying up a potential source of revenue for Wolverine's cash-strapped school. Meanwhile, Professor The Beast is taking a class shrunk to microscopic size on a Fantastic Voyage tour of the mutant body, to let readers now that shrinking X-Men down to microscopic size and inserting them into a mutant body is a thing Beast can do just in case that comes up later in the story.

And, as it turns out, it does! Wolverine takes Kid Omega with him to a space casino, where he hopes to have the young mutants psychic abilities allow him to cheat the house and win enough space money to keep the school doors open, and while those two are off causing trouble in space, trouble from space visits the school, in the form of the millions of microscopic Brood aliens filling Kitty Pryde's apparently pregnant belly and a big, scary alien scientist, who is visiting the school to exterminate Broo, the mutant Brood alien (Beast and the X-Men fight the teensy Brood horde inside Kitty, while she and Broo face the big, scary alien outside her).

It's the sort of storytelling Aaron excels at—ideas and action so big and crazy they are more than a little bit silly, but with the characters embracing and reacting to it with either deadpan serious acceptance or the sort of winking commentary that lets readers now that the super-people, like their writer and their audience, is aware of how this all looks. It also gives Bradshaw his most ample opportunity yet to show off his design skills, as he not only gets to draw the many and varied characters of the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, but also all sorts of aliens and space ships and whatnot...and not a corner of a panel looks the least bit phoned-in. Bradshaw is drawing his fingers off in this series.

Which might explain why he's not drawing every issue (That, or perhaps Marvel was publishing it more-than-monthly? Now I don't remember how long ago they started doing their randomly accelerated publishing schedule on books that weren't Amazing Spider-Man).

The Bachalo-drawn fourth issue is more-or-less an epilogue, with Wolverine finding himself (extremely) temporarily confined to a wheel chair ala Xavier thanks to a blast from an alien weapon that mangled his legs beyond his healing factor's ability to mend, and the kids going to the casino to beat the hell out of it. Meanwhile, Sabretooth and Beast fight in space at the S.W.O.R.D. headquarters, with Beast and Agent Abigail Brand eventually winning the day after getting their asses kicked pretty hard (and after lots of SWORD extras get killed, mostly off-panel).

The shift in tone is just as dramatic in the shift in art styles, going from Silver Age zany to Dark Age melodramatic in the space of an issue, but the X-Men are a big and varied enough container that they fit all that and more...especially the way Aaron writes them.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 1

Jason Aaron followed a long, healthy, mostly high-quality run on Marvel's Wolverine character on various monthlies and miniseries with this new book, launched in 2011 and spinning out of the events of the Aaron-written X-Men: Schism storyline, in which Scott Summers' long, gradual leaning toward increasingly radical tactics finally split the X-Men into two more-or-less antagonistic sides: That of Cyclops and that of Wolverine.

Aaron's X-Men team for this book consisted of Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Beast, Iceman, Rachel Grey, Husk and, um, Doop, but the title featured two pretty drastic deviations from the bulk of the other X-books.

First, the heroes weren't running around having superhero adventures (that happened in the many other X-Men books, many of which featured these very same characters), but were instead running a school for teenage mutants. At Charles Xavier's urging, Wolverine opened the Jean Grey School For Higher Learning, built on the ruins of the original Charles Xavier School For Gifted Youngsters, where the X-Men character who seems the least suited to acting as a role model or teaching and shaping young minds is now the headmaster.

And, secondly, it was something of a sitcom based around that premise. It was a comic comic book, a comedy with some superheroic elements around the edges, rather than a straight superhero action/adventure fight comic with some comedic elements.

The first three-issue arc, which makes up three of the four issues in this first collection of the series, features the first day of the school's opening, in which Kitty and Wolvie are worriedly awaiting the arrival of a pair of inspectors from the New York State Department of Education, to greenlight the new school. Beast has designed and built the new campus into a high-tech, sci-fi facility—Aaron writes Beast as a sort of manic, mad scientist; Reed Richards on seven espressos. These inspectors function as the point-of-view characters, introducing readers to the grounds, the teachers and the students.

This is the point at which the major antagonists of this early portion of Aaron's run decide to attack, the previously-introduced, tween version of The Hellfire Club (even the villains in Aaron's Wolverine and the X-men are "funny" villains; super-rich, amoral pre-teen versions of your typical Marvel evil corporate raider type, including a descendent of the public domain Victor Frankenstein, who arrive on a hill over-looking the campus in their flying limousine).

They attack with a variety of mad-science weapons, including a mutant descendent of Krakoa (the sentient island that figured heavily in the somewhat controversial, retconned action of X-Men: Deadly Genesis), an army of Frankenstein's monsters with flame-throwers and by transforming the school inspectors into monsters (a wendigo and a sauron, to be specific).

Naturally, the good guys win, but they do so mainly via the assistance of Quentin "Kid Omega" Quire, the bratty punk rock mutant student from Grant Morrison's millennial New X-Men run (particularly the "Riot at Xavier's" storyline), a run that heavily informs Aaron's set-up for the series. Quire manages to turn Krakoa—who is itself a sort of mutant—to their side by acknowledging his/its feelings and giving he/it a sense of inclusion.

While the student body includes some pre-existing, carry over characters—Blindfold, Glob, Armor, etc—the students Aaron focuses most of his attention on are new ones who share something in common with Kid Omega: Bad guys learning to be good, which gives the school something of a reformatory feel.

Not only has Wolverine talked Captain America into remanding Kid Omega into his custody, other students include a mutant brood named Broo, a brash Shi'ar prince called Kid Gladiator and, before this volume's over, Krakoa and Genesis, a clone of Apocalypse taken from an X-Force adventure (He joins in issue four, along with an amnesiac and strangely powered Angel, currently having long blond hair, not-blue skin and metal wings, a state he was put in during an X-Force storyline).

Visually, this first volume isn't as strong as it could or should be, given the contributors. Chris Bachalo is billed as the primary artist, and while his highly-stylized designs and line-work, and his smooth and round figures make hims pretty ideally suited for young characters and comic book comedy, it's maybe not the best introduction to a brand-new, rather chaotic setting (parts of the school are made out of ice, parts made of brick and mortar, parts of floating metal, the "Danger Room" is now everywhere, including the restrooms, for sneak attacks, etc).

The action component of the storyline is so chaotic—essentially, the school's grounds come to life and try to devour all of its inhabitants, from every direction—and among the X-Men's responses are for Iceman to create a small army of Icemen, each of which looks different, that Bachalo and company cross the line between energetically confused and urgent into just plain confusing. It probably doesn't help that it is Bachalo and company, and not just Bachalo: Duncan Rouleau and Matteo Scalera help pencil issue #3, and there are seven inkers on the first three issues, including Rouleau and Scalera.

The book really starts to find its groove in the fourth issue, with the introduction of mostly-regular artist Nick Bradshaw, whose style is smooth, clean, stately and ordered, compared to the ink heavy, jittery work of Bachalo (there is some common ground in their character design, but that's about it).

Bradshaw's highly-detailed work recalls that of Arthur Adams to a degree, and while it takes a bit of getting used to after Bachalo's introductions to the cast—his handsome, smooth-chinned Wolverine especially caught me off guard after seeing a few issues of Bachalo's more feral, hairy version—Bradshaw does an excellent job of establishing all of the characters and the settings, in a way that it would have probably helped in the earlier issues of the series as well.

A sort of deep-breath issue, #4 not only introduces Bradshaw, but the new, new students—Genesis and Angel—and introduces a rather mundane conflict (What are the X-Men gonna do for funding, if they have to rebuild the whole school after the first day?) and a rather bizarre one (Kitty Pryde becomes mysteriously seven months pregnant practically over night).

This is such a different take on the X-Men, that it is hard to imagine it ever being the take on the X-Men, but because Marvel has such a huge line of X-books, there was an unexploited niche this book could claim as its own. If you want mutant superheroes fighting each other, debating politics and mulling over their byzantine continuity, there are plenty of books for that. This is the big, crazy, funny X-Men comic.