Dark X-Men #1

“Journey to the Centre of the Goblin: Part 1” – January 2010

From Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk, the creators who brought us the spectacular Captain Britain and MI13, comes a book that, by all rights, shouldn’t be any good, but, you know, is. I wasn’t really a fan of the Dark line of books that spun out of Dark Reign (Dark Avengers et al), but this book was pretty fun. The story features an evil group of X-Men, including Mystique, Mimic, and Age of Apocalypse Beast playing heroes and converging on a small town to investigate a new mutant for Norman Osborne. The book could have easily end up trite and/or ultra-violent, but Cornell’s deft touch for character work and for humanizing baddies (currently on display in Action Comics) and Kirk’s talent for capturing subtle, human moments through body language and composition, resulted in a fun tale that’s more interested in character interaction than in plot. Mystique, portrayed here as a wary and only slightly conniving leader, and Beast, who only seems to commit horrific and obscene genetic crimes to alleviate his own boredom, fair the best. Sure, it’s a first issue and, as such, the story suffers from exposition and a bit too much set up, but Cornell and Kirk have done the impossible in making me care both about a Dark Reign tie-in and a set of third string X-Men villains and that’s certainly enough. A quick side note: he may not be much for interiors, but I do enjoy Simone Bianchi’s covers. Just sayin’.