Brikar

Well now, well now, well now.

I wasn't sure about this when I first heard it was going to happen. I thought, "That's interesting. But X-Men? I wonder how that will turn out."

Well, here we are, four issues into Whedon's run on "Astonishing X-Men", and I have to say, this is the first comic in YEARS that I've decided to start following regularly, and that I've actually LOOKED FORWARD to getting each month.

I had dropped X-Men after the uber-cool (but uber-exhausting) "Onslaught" storyline. There was just too much X, y'know? It was ridiculous - there were like three X-Men teams, characters I barely recognized, and all sorts of side-teams with silly names like X-Factor or X-Calibur.

So I dropped X-Men, sadly. The stories that made X-Men so interesting earlier on were gone. People were dying and coming back to life. The dialogue was flat, and nothing was particularly interesting, even Wolverine, the X-Man with the most dramatically interesting backstory.

So I wondered what Joss Whedon would do with X-Men.

Well, I'll tell you what he did with X-Men - he saved them. And the best part about it - he manages to acknowledge that the X-Men needed a boost in the actual story. The social commentary that that block-headed Scorned was all pissy and moany about at TW is here in force, and is, in fact, the very CENTER of what is going on at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

It seems a mysterious corporation called Benetech has created a "cure" for the mutant strain. With the "normal" people on one side calling mutation a "disease" and proud mutants on the other who see their mutations as Xavier does, as gifts, no matter how hated or feared they are on the other, someone is bound to be stuck in the middle: the mutants who hate their "gifts".

The X-Men team has been stripped down to what it should be: a small team of mutants who teach at the school. Thankfully gone are the multiple "Alpha" or "Blue" teams or whatever the hell they were back in the 1990s. Now, we've just got Cyclops, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Hank "Beast" McCoy and Wolverine/Logan. Jean Grey is dead, and Professor Xavier has taken a leave of absence, leaving Frost in charge of a school full of mutant students and Cyclops in charge of the X-Men.

Cyclops realizes they've lost their way, and decides that the X-Men have to get back to their superhero team routes. They bring back the old outfits, the old attitudes that the X-Men are there to HELP people, that they aren't just a team of mutants with superpowers, but they're HEROES.

"We have to astonish them," Cyclops says as the team preps for their first mission - to break up a hostage situation.

Astonish us they have. The team is charged with personal conflict from within, as well - Frost and Scott are sleeping together, which Wolverine takes personally as a defilement of Jean's memory. Kitty doesn't trust Emma as far as she can throw her. And Hank is just plain SICK of being a mutant.

Plotting, dialogue, even the artwork are all top-notch in this book. I can't rave about it enough. If only this story were easily adapted into the next "X-Men" feature film, we'd all be creaming our pants in the theatres. It's very "X-Men", and yet, it has that distinctive Joss Whedon flavor to it that even if we didn't know he was writing it, we could guess it fairly quickly.

Astonishing.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

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