OK, new comics came out on Thursday last week due to the Canada Day holiday, and I didn’t get mine till Sunday, so this is new to me anyway. Up for review is

Astonishing X-Men #25
writer: Warren Ellis
penciler: Simone Bianchi

This is the first issue of Astonishing X-Men I have every bought. I read the first trade, but it didn’t really impress me enough to get me buying the monthly. Plus, I’ve always though Joss Whedon to be a little over rated. I’ve never sat through a episode of Buffy, I’ve only watched a few issues of Angel, and Serenity has been sat on the hard-drive of our HD DVR for months. Every time I try to watch it I end up falling asleep. When I heard Warren Ellis was coming on board to get the title into mainstream Marvel, and kick off the Manifest Destiny storyline, I decided to check it out.

One thing that confused me off the bat is that the X-Men seem to be living in their new headquarters already. Why this confuses me is because all the other X titles still seem to be in the middle of Divided We Stand, so it feels like this is out a bit early. Oh well, that doesn’t bother me, on with the review:

Warren opens this issue with a nice little in-joke for his fans. Armor is sat on the computer chatting to friends on Twitter. This is funny because Warren regularly uses Twitter to spout random insane rants about a variety of subjects. Armor is fixated on finding a new name, because Wolverine is teasing her because of her current one. Ellis does something very clever with this character. As Armor is a new X-(Wo)Man he uses her questioning nature to introduce new readers to the cast and ask salient questions about the base and their new mission. This is clever because it doesn’t bog down old readers with a long and boring introduction. Very nice literary technique there! We are a gently reintroduced to the X-Men, and their new status quo in the first few pages, there is a lot of character work here, and the team really feels like a family, which is something the books have been missing for a while.

After being re-introduced the X-Men embark on their first mission, which is a consultative job for the SFPD. A burning, body has been found floating in mid-air after a botched heist. It seems the victim knew his killer and was tracking him. After Wolverine extracts a tissue sample (Biotech tip: never sample tissue with Wolverine’s claw, it goes right through his skin. Samples need to be clean of all foreign DNA for PCR work) and Beast works it up. There follows a bit of comic science whereby we find that these two people are artificially created mutants. The X-Men then head out to find the missing murderer, and solve the mystery of how they used triploid chromosomes to create mutant powers.

This was a really nice issue. There were some great idea in here, such as the X-Men dressing in Civvies to work with the police, as wearing a costume raises all sorts of questions in the post Civil War world. The comic science wasn’t bad, but that stuff is always a little hard to pull off There is some good set up for future issues here, and I will definitely be picking up the next issue. One thing that bugs me is that this should really be a #1 issue. It just seems weird to me.

The artwork by Simone Bianchi is really nice, he is particularly good at facial expression. One criticism is that I think this was inked a little heavily, which seems to darken the mood a little for a main X-Book. This would be perfect for X-Force, but here it seems to make the mood feel gloomy on a book that should feel like a fresh start for mutants.

Grade: 8 out of 10 triploid chromosomes

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