Welcome to another edition of the Marvel Rundown. The comics community might be preparing for the behemoth of San Diego Comic Con, but there are still new comics releasing this week! Today, we set our sights on Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, and her new adventures as a member of the X-Men in NYX #1.
After that, keep scrolling down for our review of the new Deadpool & Wolverine: WWIII #3
What did you think of this week’s batch of fresh Marvel Comics, True Believers? The Beat wants to hear from you! Give us a shout-out, here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking.
NYX #1
Writer: Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly
Artists: Francesco Mortarino
Color Artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: VC’s Joe Sabino
Cover Artist: Sara Pichelli and Federico Blee
When you pick up a book set to help launch a franchise on the bring of another pop culture explosion, starring one of the most exciting Marvel characters of the 21st century, you expect to see something fresh and new. NYX #1, from the writing team of Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, along with artist Francesco Mortarino, is instead a bland remix of better stories that squanders most of what makes Ms. Marvel appealing.
Mortarino’s art, especially as elevated by colorist Raúl Angulo’s bold, vibrant colors, is full of energy. The young characters are stylish and, critically, look like teens. There’s a visual flair that outpaces the script. Mortarino fills the pages with central images of characters and builds the layouts around them. Kamala leaps off the page in front of a backdrop of panels or surrounded by dancing inserts that wrap around the figure. Lanzing and Kelly’s script focuses primarily on Kamala Khan, and she is almost always most prominent on the page. If there’s a weakness to the art it is that everyone looks young, with soft facial features and low shoulders, there is little to differentiate the adults from the teens. For a book that hinges on the exuberance of youth contrasted with the perceptions of those in authority, it sometimes undermines the script. But it its action and expressiveness makes up for any shortcoming. VC’s Joe Sabino rounds out the visuals with his solid work on letters. Visually, this book is a stunner and is distinct from the other books we’ve seen from the X-Men “From the Ashes” line so far.
Lanzing and Kelly’s script, though, underwhelms despite presenting some interesting ideas. Its stated purpose is to explore how a culture finds community amidst diaspora. But the voices this writing pair try to muster up for the hip young minority teens is inauthentic. This story could just as easily have been a Spider-Man script with the barest of tweaks. Characters explicitly talk about Krakoa and the challenges of how to move on from its end and find meaning, but that’s all that it is–talk. Kamala spends some time navigating her new mutant identity and is challenged in her attempts at solidarity by the cold and pompous Sophie Cuckoo, who comes out of this issue the most interesting character by far.
Structurally, NYX falters out of the gate. Where Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman’s first issue of X-Men gave us a straightforward reintroduction to the characters that oriented us to the new status quo while also catching new readers up on the cast and concepts, Lanzing and Kelly have created a first issue that brings in a number of B and C level X-Men characters with no contextualizing who they are or what they do. As someone without the encyclopedic knowledge of these characters just looking for an accessible on-ramp, it’s difficult to know why I should care about Anole. The character Prodigy appears without introduction or explanation–What are his powers and what is his motivation in this new setting? How and why does Kamala Khan have his phone number?
And amid it all is the question of Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel herself, a great character in her own right with a TV series and a big budget movie to her name. This is a character who should be able to anchor a standalone series but is now just one part of an ensemble book in a larger franchise. NYX is the culmination of the the big fear fans of the character had when she was revealed to be a mutant — that she would become just another X-Man among many. The book is so packed with character that there is only the briefest glimpse of Kamala’s homelife. The first two pages of the book explicitly take her out of her home in Jersey City and plop her in New York where she is, again, just one superheroes among many. She’s still fun and quirky but she does not get much chance to shine.
VERDICT: This is a book that wastes an exciting character and bogs her down with a cast of mostly nobodies. SKIP.
Rapid Rundown!
- Deadpool & Wolverine: WWIII #3
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- Just in time for SDCC and Deadpool & Wolverine comes the finale to WW3 wherein I will make a bold new claim by the end of this review! Bringing Joe Kelly back to coronate Deadpool’s big return party is a no-brainer decision, but what surprises is how Kelly nails the Wolverine monologues, and hammers it home with Wade Wilson wisecracks. Thematically, the entire three issue series is about entropy or rather how the headlining healing factor mutants are beholden to the concept– Logan and Wade will degrade into chaos when put upon, and often do; more so with Wade. But that’s not really true either– Deadpool and Wolverine have become ubiquitous as top billed comic characters, so much so that we know they’re the best at what they do, even if what they do ain’t nice. They are no longer random. They are predictable, which means, for this context, they are not beholden to entropy. It’s a lovely background arc for a Deadpool and Wolverine romp told all the more scintillating with Adam Kubert on layouts. This book is impossible/improbable to read digitally with all the vertically shifted pages, but immaculate to experience in print where physically turning the book sideways can make the read feel random without being literally random. I’ve always found Kubert to draw Logan so wide, so seeing the compositions alter page dimension to account for it really helps liven the otherwise visually violent world these two assassins live in. A fun note is Frank Martin using flat color for most the blood in this– with all the shading/highlights painted into each character, and with color moods ranging from stark red to cold Siberian blue, the choice to remove depth from an effect color shows remarkable skill in immersing readers without overstimulating the palette. Now, ‘overstimulating’ may be the best descriptor for most Deadpool lettering with so many balloons to fill with that signature white radial burst, so VC’s Joe Sabino doubled down by doing the same for the villain! However, the decision to mirror Wade’s classic balloon style helps the villain come off welcoming and similar without reinventing the entire wheel per se to highlight “this is the bad guy.” For a mini-series meant to capitalize on this year’s MCU title, Deadpool & Wolverine: WWIII found a way to be a total celebration of 90s Marvel comics, which has been a signature of the C.B. Cebulski EiC era, but also a deconstruction-lite of what makes both Logan and Wade such deeply fascinating characters. I said I would end on a bold new claim: THIS SINGLE ISSUE WILL FUEL THE NEXT DECADE OF MARVEL FANFIC. — Beau Q.
Next week: X-Men books just keep coming and Blood Hunt ends.
