X-Men United #1 Tries to Do Something New and Falls on Its Face (Review)

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X-Men United #1 comes from writer Eve Ewing, best known for Exceptional and Black Panther, and artist Tiago Palma. The book brings together the various X-teams and their students for an all-new school focused comic. However, this first issue isn’t going to grab you unless you read Exceptional. Otherwise, it’s a below average X-Men comic that doesn’t even live up to its title.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Pros	Cons
Graymatter Lane recycles a good Krakoa Era idea	The only characters that stand out are from Exceptional, so if you don’t like them, you’re out of luck
	The art looks strange; it’s not terrible, but it’s also not good, and Cyclops looks very bad
	The art looks strange; it’s not terrible, but it’s also not good and Cyclops looks very bad

X-Men United #1 Doesn’t Make an Argument For Its Existence

Eve Ewing’s Exceptional X-Men was the lowest-selling of the three flagship books that launched with “From the Ashes”, and it didn’t really catch on with the greater fandom. Ewing, as a writer, is fine, better at characters than anything else, but the main problem with X-Men United #1 is that if you didn’t care about Exceptional, you aren’t going to like this book. The only interesting thing aboutit is the new telepathic school, which is basically just the Altar, a mental habitat created by Legion in the Krakoa Era Way of X. That’s all.

This book was sold to readers as a return to the unity of the mutant race, and it mostly does that, but here’s the thing: the first issue isn’t interesting at all. We get a meeting of the adult mutants, we get a training scene, we get to see a mutant being welcomed into the school, a scene meant to play on nostalgia that doesn’t work, and an ending that is the opposite of hype. There’s really no reason to read this comic; the story isn’t interesting, the ideas aren’t fresh, and there are a lot of characters who do nothing. I don’t even know why anyone would want to read the next issue, because this is just more of Brevoort pitting mutants against each other because he likes heroes to be mad at each other. There is nothing to get X-fans excited in this book and that’s not a good sign for the X-office.

X-Men United #1’s Art Doesn’t Look Great

Image Courtesy of Marvel COmics

The book is drawn by Tiago Palma, who first started working at Marvel last year. The art for this book is sort of like the writing, in that it doesn’t really do anything special. Palma’s figure work is weird. The first place I noticed how blah things look was when he drew Cyclops. Every time the hero appears in the first issue, he looks off, and it reveals a problem that this book’s art has: some characters look okay, and some look bad.

There’s something about the line work that just doesn’t look good. Characters have weird proportions and the character acting doesn’t get across the emotion of the scene. Nothing about the design of the interiors of Graymatter Lane stand out, and the one action scene in the comic has a complete lack of visual excitement or fluidity. This book has no visual flair, and that’s a huge problem for a comic. Marvel not putting an A-list artist on this book is a very bad sign.

X-Men United #1 is a disappointment, yet another misstep from the X-office. It doesn’t do anything interesting with the first issue and doesn’t really fix the problems that most of the X-books have been having; in fact, it just repeats the “Cyclops is mad that people don’t do what he says” arc that has been the main “From the Ashes” idea. If you liked Exceptional X-Men, you might like this comic. If you didn’t, just read Uncanny X-Men instead.

X-Men United #1 is on sale now.

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