Broken Frontier

Pak handles the relaunch of Astonishing, looking to the past to build a brighter tomorrow.

With the X-Men divided, Cyclops' mental well-being is at issue. While he may only have half of the mutant population to care for on Utopia, he now has half to worry about beyond his reach. When Storm begins acting strange, readers are left to wonder if Cyclops is seeing things without his usual rose-tinted glasses, or if this is the world we now live in.

McKone works best in large, expressive pages. It might be why the cover, and its actual page in the book, are some of the strongest artist works in the issue, alongside the team of Cyclops and Storm taking out a trio of Sentinels. Beyond these moments of intense love and rage, showing the best and worst of what the X-Men can be, his work with Racehlle Rosenberg brings a humanity to the mutants that remained in Utopia. From the rosiness of Dr. Rao's cheeks and the stark whiteness of Storm's hair, to the contrasting of Scott's light beams and Ororo's lightning, the book is a visual treat. Their Ororo isn't simply aloof goddess, but impish challenger to the normal, and Scott is not pretty-boy milquetoast but weathered general dealing with a lot on his plate, but trained not to show it.

There has to be a certain level of credit handed to Pak here. Many readers picking up this book might not have read Astonishing X-Men since Joss Whedon launched it years ago, and are giving it a chance again with Regenesis. With Astonishing X-Men now clearly helmed by one writer running the book concurrently with all the others (instead of being forgotten for events or running more as a "let certain creators have fun" book), it takes a fresh start… and then confuses the hell out of everyone. Why is Storm back to her retro look? We just saw her join the Avengers in her modern design. Is she in love with Cyclops? But she's married to Black Panther! The final pages confirm the confusion but don't answer it, only raising new questions. "Another Cyclops?" Is that Nightcrawler from the X-Men: Evolution series? Some might take this as an assumption that they've missed way too much in Astonishing X-Men and should abandon it. With Pak onboard, there's almost an implied promise that you'll get the answers you want.

On the other hand, it'd be foolish to rely on a writer's previous works to judge their new work. "Exalted" starts off hitting some beats that other X-books have hit during Regenesis, namely with Scott's issues regarding the schism. The middle of the issue, especially with the twist ending, seems to have had zero consequence to the story as a whole, other than to pull the rug out from the reader. As a part one, it's more of a tease than a beginning, but it's interesting enough that readers will want to see where it's going. In fact, the issue is almost stigmatic of Marvel as a whole; while a quality story, it's not a $4 comic with extra material or notably longer page-count, it's an average-length book that DC would have "held the line" at.

Pak, having come off of reinventing the Hulk for the past few years, seems to be almost shipped off to a once-amazing but now forgotten corner of the X-Universe. While it could be viewed as a dishonorable discharge, it's only right to view it as it is: Marvel has faith that this writer can right the ship and make a book that was once Astonishing live up to its name again.