Written by Kieron Gillen
Illustrated by Salvador Espin“The Future is a Four-Letter Word”

The Fifth Light has destroyed Tokyo, which can’t be good for the X-Men and mutant relations in general. Hope and her crew are in terrible trouble and it’s looking like Cyclops and Wolverine can’t get them out of it. Don’t miss the shocking twists and turns of the new X-Book that everyone is talking about!
I won’t lie to you, I was pretty excited for this book from the moment it was announced for several reasons. First and foremost being that it was written by Kieron Gillen. Second being that it was set to start the X-Verse’s newest “young” team, currently dubbed either The Five Lights or Generation Hope (though assumingly they’ll be getting a proper moniker at some point down the road) and I’ve historically been quite the uber-fan of both Gillen and young character teams. The first issue played out extraordinarily well as an introductory issue, and you can click below for the lowdown on Issue #2.
To be blunt right off the bat, nothing really happened during this issue other and a healthy dose of seed planting. In terms of the overall story being told, it was not strictly speaking advanced all that much, with the whole issue only seeming to take place over the course of five or ten “minutes” and ending rather abruptly on a very telling cliffhanger (as in, we know Hope will be fine because her name is in the title of the damn book.) That having been said, some of those seeds are incredibly compelling.
Seed #1 is some more hinting as to how Hope’s powers seem to function. As was implied toward the end of Second Coming, Hope can employ the use of any mutant power in existence. The exact nature of this use is thus far unexplained. Does she have to be within the same geographic vicinity, ALA Mimic? Does she have to touch a mutant to make it work, ALA Rogue? Or can she simply just do everything, ALA every good deus ex machina ever? At this point, we don’t know…though with her use of Kenji’s power this issue, we’re more or less assured that Gillen will take us down a road that will end (or at least get us close) to that particular reveal.
Seed #2 is the brief conversation between Wolverine and Teon that implies a brawl between the two of them somewhere in the near future. I can only hope that this side-scene has nothing to do with the horrendous Jeph Loeb penned arc from Wolverine that implied some kind of connection between all feral mutants, since that train wreck is almost certainly one to be left far in the past.
Seed #3 is the reveal that Kenji is (duh), absolutely not in control of his powers and that Hope clearly cannot right them by touching his manifestations and must lay her hands on his actual body, confirming that all the techno-organic matter he’s creating are not physical appendages. That said, we don’t know what they are just yet, leaving him one of the least defined of the Lights. Though, I suspect this too will be solved.
Gillen manages to inject a fair amount of mystery into this book following the largely introductory look into the characters’ minds last issue. It definitely enough to pique my interest as this book is shaping itself up to be the go-to book for new developments in the world of mutants given the fact that the Lights are not just new mutants, but the newest step forward for the whole race. As a long time mutant fan, I can’t wait to see what gets revealed in these pages going forward.
However, I feel the only thing that drags this issue down a bit is Salvador Espin’s art. Ultimately, I feel he is just a little too sloppy this issue to be considered tight, and in a lot of ways not sloppy enough to be considered experimental. Overall, it just isn’t great work…his characters other than the lights themselves are pretty crudely constructed and his backgrounds (especially the scene in Kenji’s mind) are just way too poorly defined and lack any sort of detail. While I do think that this book needs an inherently cartoony, traditional comic vibe for its art, I really don’t think Espin is capable of the detail and composure necessary to make it work. I hate to say it, but part of me longs for one of Gillen’s past collaborators on this one (particularly Steven Sanders or Jamie McKelvie) instead.
Overall though, I’m still hooked by concept and the story being told, and that is enough to bring me back for some time to come…just wish they’d get the art to seem a little less rushed.
Final Verdict: 8.4 – Buy
