He was the ultimate villain of New X-Men - let's not get started about how Magneto and Xorn fit into it or we’ll be here for weeks - and he starts the book off by. Wood brings back the villainous, mutant-hating John Sublime, a sentient spore in the shape of a man (just in case you doubted that Morrison created him). That book had a combination of wide popularity and an array of underused concepts which make it a well for newer titles to dip into. There’s a lot of heavy X-continuity going on in Primer, although much like Joss Whedon run on Astonishing, a smart decision was made to use Grant Morrison’s New X-Men as the source. I’ll give Wood a lot of credit for not using “Wolverine Publicity,' instead having Logan not appear in the book until issue four, and only then after the main arc has ended. The school is the host of a number of X-titles, including Astonishing X-Men, and in a nice bit of continuity, Rogue mentions borrowing the speed of that team’s Northstar. All of its members have been part of the X-Men for at least twenty years (in real-time anyway) and nearly all of them were operating out of the Jean Grey School already. What separates X-Men from many of those books is that its cast doesn’t feel like a gimmick. These books are all unfortunately no longer being published for a variety of reasons, and hopefully Marvel won’t take that as a sign that female-heavy comics are unprofitable. All-female or majority-female teams were another theme of Marvel NOW!, with Avengers Assemble revolving around Spider-Woman, Fearless Defenders being comprised entirely of women, and Uncanny X-Force having Puck as the only male teammate. 1: Primer kept up the readers’ anticipation for one huge reason: the entire cast is female. It was the last of the original NOW! titles to launch since Olivier Coipel needed more time as with John Cassaday, Marvel really needs to remember to not put Coipel on too many projects at once.Įven with the delay, the issues collected in X-Men Vol. But the wide range of X-titles has provided quite a few interesting reading options, with the stand-out for me being Brian Wood’s X-Men. Of course, it didn’t always work out the two X-Force titles have been combined into one and X-Men: Legacy is coming to an end, both because its story is over and because Marvel likely wants to reuse that title.

One of the Marvel NOW! initiative’s main concepts was “try everything,' especially when it came to relaunching nearly the entire X-Men line.

Remember when I used to review Marvel trades? Let’s get back to that for a bit.

X-Men, Vol. 1 by Brian Wood