Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone vol. 1: Red Wave

While Cyclops and his band of X-Men are busy getting back to the business of being public-facing superheroes, another group is still trying to figure out what their next step will be.  That would be Rogue, Gambit, Wolverine, and Jubilee (with a visit from Nightcrawler) as they head down to Louisiana to crash with another old friend of Logan’s.  That next step winds up being decided for them when four new teenage mutants show up on their doorstep looking for sanctuary.  It turns out that something has been hunting them.  Something that its not only connected to the new anti-mutant organization on the block, but Charles Xavier’s history as well.

“Red Wave” arrives on the heels of “Homecoming” and I’ll say this up front:  It’s not quite as good.  The latter title does a better job of telling multiple straightforward superhero stories in its first volume while stringing together some longer plot threads between them.  I also think it addresses the post-Krakoan Era fallout better than this title does.  “Red Wave,” on the other hand, feels like a smaller scale, more character-driven affair with one lengthy plot driving the volume.  That’d be the new team versus new villain Sarah Gaunt who’s fleshed out to a decent extent, even if she doesn’t seem like she’s cut out to be a proper A-list threat.

New writer Gail Simone’s grasp on the familiar characters is pretty solid, and I really like the fact that she (and previous writers since Kelly Thompson did a great job establishing it) have been committed to the Rogue/Gambit marriage.  She also writes an appealingly gruff Wolverine, though her decision to have Rogue state that he has PTSD is… certainly a choice.  Not that you can’t write about something like that, but it’s hard to see how you can do it well in a mainstream superhero title where a character is meant to have ongoing adventures each month.  Either they’re constantly dealing with it in a way that’s realistic and derails the aforementioned adventures, or it gets pushed off to the side and never mentioned again.  Then there’s the fact that this is Wolverine we’re talking about and if he was suffering from it, he would’ve lost his mind from constantly being in situations that have undoubtedly compounded it over the years.

Getting back to the parts of the story that I did like, the new mutants also make a favorable impression as well.  One-minute hyper-adapter Jitter, heartless (literally) heavy-hitter Ransom, Calico (and her horse), and Deathdream, who’s so dark and grim that he becomes adorable as a result, do the whole show-up-unannounced-and-fight bit which has been done before.  The good news is that they’ve got enough personality to make up for deploying that trope again.  Their presence also feels additive to this volume in the sense that you’re not waiting for the focus to get back to the veterans here.

This volume also benefits from having most of it drawn by David Marquez, who specializes in detailed superhero art.  Which means that he can draw scenes involving mutants duking it out with their powers as well as mutants duking it out with a grumpy magical dragon and have them both look stylish.  He’s also good with the more mundane scenes where people are just talking and the drama doesn’t stem from superpowers.  That said, Marquez’s work does have a quirk in these scenes where his style occasionally shifts without explanation to a simpler, cuter one without warning.  I don’t think this style in itself is bad, but it’s incongruent with everything else even if it does make me wonder what it would look like if he did an entire issue in that way.

Javier Garron also pitches in on the final issue which sees the new kids sent off to school.  His style has a different kind of detail to it in that it comes off as appealingly cartoonish with how animated everyone is.  It’s good, and I think he’ll make a fine co-artist for this title along with Marquez, but he also manages to draw the widest Wolverine I’ve ever seen.  Which is either a choice or a huge mistake that will be rectified in subsequent issues.

So it’s a decent start for this latest volume of “Uncanny” even if I don’t feel it’s all it could be yet.  It does have an ongoing mystery in the “Who is the Endling?” business set up at the start, but we’ve been there before with characters that are destined to end the mutant species before.  Still, I like most of what Simone is doing here and she’s clearly doing right by her new creations.  By that I mean I’m genuinely concerned for what’s going to happen to Calico in the upcoming “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover, so bring that on.