The First X-Men #1 Review

With each superhero blockbuster movie that hits the big screen, the influence of those successes can be increasingly felt on their comic book counterparts. In this case, it’s hard to ignore the blatant influence of X-Men: First Class on Neal Adams and Christos Gage’s The First X-Men. Set “many years ago” before the X-Men were a thing, Wolverine embarks on a mission to protect young mutants from the government, and, among others, he recruits a certain Nazi-hunting mutant to help him with his cause.

Adams has without a doubt done some great work in the past, but his pencils here do not hold up. The flow of the visuals constantly becomes marred when unclear, static imagery fills the panel. It’s like the narrative has gum on the bottom of its shoe. Some moments work out well enough, but even when Adams does put together a good scene, the awkward design of his Neanderthal-esque Wolverine manages to sink the quality back down.

While the art does not make for a selling point, the story works on some levels. There are a handful of cool touches that set this as an X-Men story taking place at a time when nothing we know has been established yet. Xavier is a naive and selfish student, Wolverine is buddies with Sabertooth, and he attacks baddies using his bone claws along with a pair of samurai swords. It’s these and other similar touches that are the highlight of the book.

With so much continuity to the X-Men in the first place, it’s hard to decide where this fits or if it even fits at all. At this point in Wolverine’s life, his sudden sympathy for other mutants hardly coincides with his typical loner style. And are we to believe he went to a young Xavier and asked him for help during this series, only to wind up as one of the X-Men decades later? This and some other similar story beats stress my sense of believable continuity to the point where it partially hinders the issue’s fun.

Despite these hangups, this book is not all that bad. If you liked X-Men: First Class with its dated time period and younger characters that operate in a world without what we know as the X-Men, then this title will please. Like the movie, it is perhaps best to ignore the continuity established before it and focus on the entertaining characters struggling to complete a dire mission.

Joshua is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter or IGN, where he is hell-bent on making sure you know his opinion about comic books.

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