(writer) Brian Michael Bendis
(artists) David Marquez and various, including Arthur Adams, Bruce Timm, Skottie Young, David Mack, Lee Bermejo, J. Scott Campbell and many, many more.
About a week or so ago I reviewed another landmark issue in which writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Marquez were joined by a gaggle of guest artists, namely Ultimate Spider-Man #200, which featured a lovely tribute to the late, lamented "ultimate" version of Peter Parker. I remarked that Bendis really seems at home with these kinds of special issues, and he hits yet another home run with the 25th issue of the X-Men title he launched three years back, All New X-Men.
The entire premise of the title is that Hank McCoy, a.k.a. the Beast, devastated by Professor X's murder at the hands of his old friend Cyclops back in the pages of Avengers vs. X-Men, has gone back in time and brought FORWARD the five original X-Men, including himself, in the vague hope that this will somehow alter the present. A lot of things have happened since then (I stopped following the book after eleven issues, especially when they started bringing on the crossovers) and apparently the original X-Men can no longer go back to their proper time.
As a result, present-day Beast gets an ominous visit from a major character in the Marvel Universe whose identity I will not spoil, and gets a glimpse of the various potential futures lying in store for the X-Men which he may well have ruined with his actions.
Bendis really has a field day with such an enormous roster of artists, so much so that he eschews his usual "jam" format of having his guest artists do two-page spreads and goes for an approach that isn't usually my cup of tea but which works out just brilliantly here. There's humor and pathos in the various "alternate future" vignettes, and each one tells a mini story on its own. Of course, there are still the splash pages and those still look great, but for this particular issue Bendis needed several of his guest artists to flex some sequential muscle, and each and every one of them knocked his or her segment out of the park. Still, some of the newspaper strip/webcomic style art looks a little out of place in a comic book like this one, so I can't say I enjoyed this book quite as much as I would have if it had sported the more traditional "action" oriented artwork.
My personal favorite, largely for sentimental reasons, is Arthur Adam's Savage Land segment, which features a truly feral Beast scaring the hell out of Kazar and Zabu as he chows down on a dinosaur. It's a throwback to the comics I grew up with as a kid, and to be fair Adams has improved on his rendering skills since then.
It was quite considerate of Bendis to make this issue self-contained rather than use it as a springboard for a multi-issue story-arc, but it does require quite a bit of knowledge of what has gone before. Still, anyone with a passing knowledge of the X-Men should be able to figure things out easily enough, thanks to a little bit of exposition from the Beast's watchful visitor.
8.5/10
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