By: Victor Gischler (writer), Chris Bachalo (pencils), Tim Townsend, Wayne Faucher, Jamie Mendoza & Al Vey (inks), Bachalo (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Daniel Ketchum (associate editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)
The Story: The X-Men battle lizards and a mystery villain in the sewers of NYC while looking for missing children.
What’s Good: The X-Men work best when you reduce the cast of characters. This issue (and storyline) features Storm, Emma, Gambit & Wolverine. Toss in Spider-Man (amazing who you meet in the sewer!), and you’ve got a good cast. Gischler keeps the story bouncing along by keeping the cast small and also not foreshadowing any future storylines. Usually, I like to see little teases of what is coming up next, but Gischler somehow makes it work really well. He is also really getting a handle on these characters quickly. For example, I thought that in the first issue of this arc, he was writing Emma Frost as too whiny (complaining about the muck in the sewer), but he’s got her nailed by this issue where she’s being more sarcastic about the working conditions. [Note: Although these are fictional characters that don’t have a set personality, there are ways I prefer the characters to be depicted.]
The story itself is pretty cool and does flow from the really strong Shed storyline in Amazing Spider-Man ~#630, but if you didn’t read that you’ll be fine because the true villain in this story isn’t the Lizard, it’s someone a lot worse. The sequence where Gischler reveals the identity of the mystery villain is really well executed from a mechanics standpoint. He spends a page or two with the villain speaking through word balloon pointing off the page. The entire time, the panels are composed with really tight shots so you can’t really tell where they balloons are coming from. Then, the villain is revealed after a page turn. Wonderful! Gischler is pretty new to comics, but this is the type of thing where you think, “This guy gets it.” Way too many comics spoil these types of revelations by having the villain standing there in a full-page splash on the right hand page so you look over there and see the baddie before you’ve read any of the lead in. [Note: This issue starts oddly from an ad placement standpoint. After the customary X-title page with the credits and recap, the first left-hand page is an ad, making the first page of the actual comic on the right-hand side. This is very unusual and I wonder if it was done to accommodate this villain-reveal. If so, BRAVO guys because that reveal was kinda the key to the issue.]
Chris Bachalo again pencils and colors this issue. The pencils are typical Bachalo stuff: expressive and energetic characters, great layouts, imaginative panel designs that help the story and TONS of detail. But, his colors are really something too. He is starting to color with a detail similar to what he brings to the pencils. If you look at some of the lizard characters, you’ve first amazed at all the scales…it’s a LOT of work to pencil and ink those scales. But, Lizard isn’t just green. Each scale is colored such that it has highlights on one side and shadow on the other. Bachalo also has a LOT of good taste about what colors to use. I really don’t think he’s been coloring comics for long, but I’d say he’s already one of the best in the business. Even though there are 4 inkers on this issue, it isn’t really a problem. These are mostly the guys who usually ink Bachalo and they seem to know how to go with the flow because I couldn’t tell who inked what pages.
What’s Not So Good: Honestly, nothing is bad in this issue. The only thing that I kinda selfishly wanted was for a few of the panels of the fights between the X-Men and the lizards to be a little more clear. The action can become a little fuzzy due to the tight shots and dark composition of the panel. It could be that doing a fully choreographed fight would have been too much to add.
Conclusion: The owner of the championship belt for “Best X-Book” rotates a LOT, but I think this is my favorite X-book right now. It never hurts to have Bachalo drawing your book and Gischler is rapidly becoming a very strong comics writer who writes an entertaining story and shows that he cares about the mechanics of comic books.
Grade: A
-Dean Stell
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