By Steve Morris
Stuart Immonen’s artwork is one of the key selling points to, well, anything he is involved with, and All-New X-Men #1 is no exception. The premise of the book is that the original five members of the X-Men – Angel, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman and Beast – have come to the present for some reason (no, there’s no sign of other founding X-Men Shortpack and Sage at this point in time). They are in the present, and they are… in the present. And Stuart Immonen is drawing it! So now you know the premise of the series in its entirety.
The regardless point being, Marvel have released some of Immonen’s pencils for the first issue of the series, written by Brian Michael Bendis. And unsurprisingly, they’re spiffing, corking, and several other 1960s adjectives.
The first page shows us the Jean Grey school, Wolverine’s semi-creepy tribute to his friend’s dead wife, who is now 16 and about to stare him right back in the face. But before he has time to sleep with her and freak us all out, it looks like the team are going to first endure some face-time with Beast. Which is probably going to be especially weird for Beast. You can also see a few students running round in the background, which reveals that Pixie has moved to Westchester along with the others. Yep, Utopia is doomed. Toad is also busy, uh, washing a tree. Cyclops Jr will probably blast him in the face in a moment or two.
The third page revealed shows Beast talking to the younger X-Men, who look like the Famous Five. Look at Jean’s adorable haircut! Shame she’s about a year away from murdering billions of people, isn’t it? If young Beast is scared now, just wait till he hears about the repeated genocides his older self has been enjoying over the past few years. And let’s not even get started on Trish Trilby! Ominous times are ahead for you, McCoy. This appears to be page 20 of the first issue, so lord only knows what the first 17 pages are going to be made up of.
And as a final note, here’s the interconnected cover for the first two issues, which sees all your favourite X-Men scowling at you.
So…I’m assuming in five years half of that time traveling team will be dead and Cyclops from the past will go by a new name, be in a new costume, and add even more to the clusterfluff that is X-Men continuity? No, that’s not Cyclops, but a younger Cyclops from the past, he goes by Unibeam now.
I had the same first reaction to these pages as to the covers: “Well, we all knew Immonen was going to make it look awesome. THAT’s not the part I’m skeptical about.”
“Yep, Utopia is doomed.”
That was pretty much a given already, seeing how they’re canceling the main Utopia-side book and replacing it with some book about some old characters, way back from the sixties I think.
Actually, he’ll go by Gazerbeam and die in a cavern fighting a giant robot.
So, does Rachel start calling Jean Jr. her sister-mom?
My jimmies are rustled
“Which is probably going to be especially weird for Beast.”
Nah… he’s met “Dark Beast”. Who is actually twenty years older than himself, since DB got shunted back in time when he escaped via that crystal.
But… if these students are from the past in the 616 universe, then how do you retcon all that happens now? Mind-wipe? Or is it another universe/timeline? And what about Professor X?
“Days of Past Futures”?
So if they are from the past, I guess the big questions they will be asking are:
* Did OJ get convicted?
* Did George Lucas ever make those prequel films people are talking about now he’s re-releasing the special editions of Star Wars?
* Is Michael Jackson still the king of pop?
Wait, that’s Dark Beast? My mind just exploded.
“Days of Past Futures”
Wait, are the X-Men now in the business of trading futures? When did they move the mansion to Wall Street?
I gotta say, I really like this premise. It could be really fun.
@Kevin: No, that’s not Dark Beast on that sample page. Dark Beast returned to the Age of Apocalypse, where he’s from.
Wonder what Jean is going to think that in the future she had lost eveything
Rob – I don’t think that’s correct. I believe the last time we saw him was in Uncanny X-Force, and he was in our reality.
There’s a basic problem with the premise. Since time travel involves movement within the space-time continuum, the X-Men can’t travel into their own future. They’d be in two places at once. From their perspective, they’re traveling into a potential future; if they jump 40 years ahead, that’s a 40-year span in which they’re not present to influence events. Going to the present of the 616 universe is logically impossible.
The physical movement which has to be accounted for is a major difference between modern approaches to time travel and the old approach, in which each microsecond was a separate interval, the future had already happened, and a time traveler could go ten seconds into his own past and greet himself.
Time travel, even the old-fashioned kind, doesn’t have to involve logical impossibilities. It can be a sightseeing trip, in which the time traveler learns shocking things about his past. “Oh, God! My great-great-grandfather was a cannibal!” Or the time travel can be played for laughs. But making the threat of a paradox a plot element invariably creates problems. Time travel isn’t going to bring about the end of the universe any more than a megalomaniacal supervillain is.
SRS
*sigh*
Get ready for lots of “I did WHAT!?” and “When did THAT happen!?” and “”I’m a big blue CAT!” and “Holy $#@%! I’m DEAD!!”
Of course, nothing will hurt quite so much as seeing that their favorite coffee shop is now a Sprint outlet.
@synsidar – i dig what your saying but the thing is, aren’t all potential futures still a future that they shouldn’t be in considering it could still happen and considering all the different alternate realities more than likely will happen. also at some point these five x-men will be going back to their own time to fulfill their destinies. the question is will they be going back with all their knowledge of the future intact, thus changing the timeline forever by making different choices as they grow older (perhaps the next big cross-over event next summer) and will they go back to their point of origin, perhaps seconds after they left thus negating the whole “40 years without them” scenario?
There are two principles:
1. A time traveler can’t change his own past, because doing so creates a paradox, aka a logical impossibility.
2. A time traveler can’t travel into his own future, both because he’s not physically present during the years covered in the travel to create that future, and because viewing his own behavior during those years would reverse cause and effect, inviting paradoxes, so it’s impossible.
The single timeline only works in a logical sense if you suppose that from the time of the Big Bang to the moment of the universe’s heat death in the far future, everything has already happened and time travelers can only safely view what’s happened; if one affects any development, in his future or past, he screws things up.
If you accept that the time traveler can’t duplicate himself—at any given moment in any timeline, there’s only one of him—then the modern approaches to time travel make perfect sense. If you claim that the time traveler can duplicate himself, then you have to invent your own version of the space-time continuum to justify it.
In the real world, the current position held by physicists is that time travel, aside from time dilation, is impossible, because no particle has been found that travels faster than light. So, any non-trivial time travel system has to make sense intellectually, or it’s a failure.
SRS
40 years? if it’s the original X-men, it’s nearer 50 years but they can’t be from 50 years in the past unless suddenly Scott et al are knocking 70 in the present?
The last two things X-Men comics need are:
-More time/reality-displaced characters
-More Original Five nostalgia.
Basically, the audience that will be able to appreciate this would have to be old-time fans. But most of them will be far more mindful of actual X-history than Brian “ADHD” Bendis will be. So it will be an exercise in frustration to everyone except those who turn their brains off and just “go with it” no matter how senseless Bendis’s retcons and poor characterizations get.
This is no slight to the creators involved in this new relaunch but I can’t help but wonder what Mike Allred would do if he was given the original X-Men to play with.
Wesley
What a convoluted book! The X-Men are messed up as a concept as it is. Bendis is going to ruin X-Men like he did Avengers.
Could someone PLEASE tell Marvel that the umpteenth “x-men (xxxx)” is no longer a guarantee of sales?? TEll some sold stories, worry more about quality than quantity and… oh, never mind. There’s wasted oxygen I’ll never get back…