Counter X vol. 3: X-Man

Some background on this first:  Back in the day when Warren Ellis getting all sorts of attention for his work on “Transmetropolitan” and “The Authority,” Marvel approached him with the opportunity to re-make three satellite X-titles in his own image.  These titles were “X-Force,” “Generation X,” and “X-Man.”  Of the three, this was the one that interested me the most due to the fact that the series had been reputedly crap for the majority of its run and that Ellis’ re-invention of the series (with co- and then later solo writer Steven Grant) actually made it into something worth reading.

Reading this today, I can see how I might’ve been more impressed had I read these issues when they’d come out.  The premise of Ellis’ re-invention involves making Nate Gray (the genetically engineered son of Cyclops and Phoenix from “The Age of Apocalypse”… imagine Cable without all of the techno-organic junk holding him back) a mutant shaman:  someone who stands apart from his tribe to deal with the problems that threaten it.  There are some interesting ideas here that Ellis would go back to in later works, such as the idea of worlds existing on higher and lower planes, but the end result is just a slightly more sophisticated version of what we were getting in the “X-books” circa 2000 A.D.

The first arc introduces us to Nate and has him fighting off a mutant beastie from one of the lower planes who actually has a good reason for crawling his way up here.   The second (and more interesting) arc shows us how Nate arrived at his new status quo.  It involves a far more fascist British Empire ruled over by who Nate thought was his companion Madeline Pryor, except that she isn’t and she’s slowly been grooming him to be her ultimate weapon in conquering the other worlds.  Both arcs have art by Ariel Olivetti, and it’s striking to see how much his style has evolved from the competent pencil art you see here to his more robust painted style that you see today (and in the covers to these issues).  While this is essentially a volume for “X” and Ellis completists, it’s still better than most stuff that I’ve lumped in that category before and it gets bonus points for including the original pitch for the revamp — something I wish we’d get more often in collections.