By Jason Aaron, Kieron Gillen, Carlos Pacheco, Frank Cho, Daniel Acuña, Alan Davis, Adam Kubert, Tim Seeley, Billy Tan & various (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-502-4
Radical change – or at least the appearance of such – is a cornerstone of modern comics. There must be a constant changing of the guard, a shifting of scene and milieu and, in latter times, a regular diet of death, resurrection and rebirth.
A case in point is this rather impressive restating of the Mutant paradigm from Marvel wherein the latest status quo gets the boot and a new beginning equates with a return to the old days…
Most people who read comics have a passing familiarity with Marvel’s ever-changing X-Men franchise and newcomers or occasional consumers won’t have too much trouble following the backstory so let’s plunge in as the hostile world once more kicks sand in the faces of the planet’s most dangerous and reviled minority…
This utterly engrossing tome (collecting X-Men Schism #1-5, Generation Hope #10-11 and X-Men ReGenesis) finds the world’s mutant population reduced to a couple of hundred desperate souls living in self-imposed exile on an island dubbed “Utopia†located in San Francisco Bay.
Although generally welcomed by most of the easygoing residents of the city, tensions are high and with X-Men team-leader Cyclops running the colony in an increasingly draconian manner, his relationship with war-weary second-in-command Wolverine is slowly, inexorably deteriorating…
Matters come to head when Logan refuses to train the latest batch of kids in combat techniques, concerned that these newest mutants are being cheated of their childhoods, after which Quentin Quire, a 16-year old anarchist telepath provokes an frantic armed response from human world leaders at an arms limitation conference intended to convince humanity to abandon their “defensive†anti-mutant weapons; which generally equates to giant robotic Sentinels of various vintages…
With the world once again on alert against “Homo Superior†attacks, every nation is frantically rearming, but the robots have all degenerated into rampaging menaces attacking their owners – if they work at all – and the assembled mutants and assorted superheroes are kept busy saving humans from their own bellicose paranoid folly…
Meanwhile a bunch of very human rich kids make a move of their own. The greedy, remorseless and ambitious scions of munitions millionaires, human traffickers and deranged scientists have waited long enough for what’s theirs and, after murdering their parents and guardians, take over the Hellfire Club to initiate their scheme of ruling the Earth before they hit puberty…
As their cynical, vicious plan unfolds, the embattled Utopians become the unwitting target of increasingly bloody attacks and Cyclops and Wolverine catastrophically clash over the role of the super-powered children in their care, almost oblivious of the launch of the new super-Sentinel devised by the impatient new Hellfire kids…
Although Utopia is saved in the nick of time, the policy-split leads to a sundering of the Mutants as Wolverine leads many of the youngest kids and some of Cyclops’ oldest, but most disappointed and disaffected, friends to a place where they can attempt a different way of living, leaving the island as a highly visible fortress against and target of human aggression; populated by warriors and militaristic genocide-survivors ready to take the Race – or perhaps more correctly, Species – War to their oppressors…
The core miniseries was scripted by Jason Aaron and illustrated by Carlos Pacheco, Frank Cho, Daniel Acuña, Alan Davis, Adam Kubert, Cam Smith, Mark Farmer & Mark Roslan with Kieron Gillen writing the intersecting chapters from Generation Hope and the epilogue X-Men ReGenesis drawn by Tim Seeley and Billy Tan, respectively.
If you crave fast, furious and fulfilling Fights ‘n’ Tights fiction this is a nearly perfect one-shop stop for your edification and delectation.
X-Men Schism is scheduled for release on January 19th 2012.
™ & © 2012 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. Italy. A British Edition by Panini UK Ltd. ™ and © 2012 Marvel Entertainment LCC and its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. A British edition released by Panini UK Ltd.