By: Victor Gischler (writer), Al Barrionuevo (pencils), Michael Lacombe (inks), Rain Beredo (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters) and Daniel Ketchum (editor)
The Story: A one-shot where Professor X helps Jubilee deal with her vampirism by relating a story of his own past experiences with vampires.
What’s Good: This is a pretty low-commitment issue for a reader that’s easy to pick up even if you don’t know much about current X-events. If you’ve been following X-Men since it’s launch, you know that the first 6 issues dealt with an attack by vampires on the X-Men’s Utopia headquarters. For those who claim “nothing ever happens” in superhero comics, the big event from that series was that Jubilee was turned into a vampire. While her vampirism was dealt with pretty well in the Wolverine and Jubliee miniseries by Kathryn Immonen & Phil Noto, there are probably a lot of fans who didn’t read that miniseries, so it’s nice to see the main X-Men series address this new aspect of a popular character.
Gischler comes up with a pretty nice way to address the issue as we see Professor X reach out to her. The Professor really works best now when he adopts this more avuncular air (versus bossing people around) and can help the younger mutants with their problems by telling them a story. In this case, he whips out a story from the 1950’s showing his first dealings with vampires in Africa. It is a fun little story that (a) reinforces the Professor’s wealth of worldly experience and (b) adds some more foundation to the vampire mega-story that Gischler has been crafting over the last year. Often these stories where a popular character relates some older story that they never bothered to mention before come off as false — as if I suddenly said to my wife, “Did I ever tell you about the time I ran into vampires in Africa before we met?” — but it really works with Xavier because he is so old. Imagine an aging grandparent and how many times they were able to whip up some old story that you’d never heard before. Cyclops can’t tell this story, but Xavier can.
The Barrionuevo/Lacombe art team gets the job done. I’m not running out to buy original pages from this issue, but everything is as it should be from a story telling standpoint: solid panels that establish new scenes, clear depictions of the action, etc. Labcombe’s inking gets a little heavy and brushy in places and I think that style works better for 1950’s Africa than 2011 Utopia, but I didn’t have any problems with the art.
What’s Not So Good: No major complaints about this issue. It isn’t an epic issue, but it isn’t really trying to be that either.
My biggest quibble is the coloring. Stop with the rendered colors! With the amount of inking that went into this issue, I really don’t know why we couldn’t have flat colors. Barrionuevo and Lacombe do a perfectly fine job of indicating shadow and I just don’t need to see the corresponding highlights on Xavier’s head. Most comics would look so much better if we could junk this whole highly rendered color crap, especially in cases where the guys doing the linework are actually showing the effort to crosshatch the areas where there is shadow. All this shading just serves to camouflage the action.
Conclusion: A nice stand-alone X-Men story that re-establishes Jubilee’s place in the X-universe and tells a jaunty tale of Young Charles Xavier in Africa.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
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