Comics / Comic Reviews / Marvel Comics

One shot for the Week of July 25th 2012

By Troy-Jeffrey Allen
July 27, 2012 - 18:30

The X-Men need another parallel universe about as much as John F. Kennedy needs another hole in his head. Seriously...we've already got Age of Apocalypse, Days of Fututre Past, Nimrod, Bishop, and Cable providing continuity migraines, do we really need more? Well…

Writer Greg Pak teams up with artist Stephen Segovia to bring you Xtreme X-Men, a new series in which alternate universe Wolverine, Emma Frost, and Nightcrawler hop around from reality to reality. Think Sliders meets X-Men and there you have it.
 
Promisingly, the book opens with an intriguingly odd ball page one. It hysterically explains how multiple severed heads of Charles Xavier are being used to teleport the population of alt-Earth to a safer world. It's fun, it's uncanny, and it has all the makings of a decidedly unique X-Men adventure. And then it's over, opting to fill its page count with an introductory monologue by Dazzler that isn't as amusing as Pak believes it to be.

By the book's end, off-world Wolverine (called James Howlett), the daughter of Emma Frost (Emmelline Summers-Frost), and Nightcrawler (a teenager) all show up in time to compare notes with the X-Men we know and love.

Xtreme X-Men is a fairly light-hearted read compared to the doom and gloom of most X-Books but it raises the exact same problem I have with DC's Earth 2 series: If the character's I'm reading aren't the real deal then why should I care? Unlike the completely revamped cultivations we find on film or in the Ultimate line, these alternate reality players will instantly come off inferior once you sit them in a scene with the originals.

Then again, I could be wrong. James Howlett and company may prove to add something new to the existing team's dynamic but from the looks of issue 1, they might have shown up too late to save themselves from the harsh reality of been there done that.

Rating: 6 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12