Written by Jason Aaron
Penciled by Carlos PachecoThe X-Men event of the decade starts here! It’s never been a more dangerous time to be a mutant. Even with their numbers at a record low, the world refuses to trust mutantkind…and after a mutant-triggered international incident, anti-mutant hatred hits new heights. Of course it’s at this moment, when the mutant race needs most to stand together, that a split begins that will tear apart the very foundation of the X-Men. From superstar writer and Marvel Architect Jason Aaron and a full roster of comics’ top artists, this is an X-tale that will reverberate for years to come! Come October, the X-Men landscape will be irreparably changed.
AND IN THIS ISSUE, EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT THE X-MEN WILL CHANGE, AGAIN, JUST LIKE THE LAST TIME THAT IT CHANGED, AND THE TIME BEFORE THAT, AND THE TIME BEFORE THAT, AND EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS REVIEW WILL CHANGE AFTER THE JUMP—
The X-Men have a lot of villains who are, broadly speaking, totally ridiculous. Stryfe, Apocalypse, Mister Sinister, Sebastian Shaw… characters who dress like cretins and who are bad, wicked, evil, all those things, but barely ever interesting as well-rounded characters in their own rights: Stryfe’s potency, such as it is, comes only from his convoluted personal continuity; Apocalypse from an overblown sense of artificial grandeur; Sinister from a menacing vagueness that would deplete him almost completely should his mysteries ever be fully resolved; Shaw’s sole allure is that he’s inherited from Claremont and Byrne, which gives him a default credibility lacked by, uh, Slayback and Sinsear. The X-franchise has a terrible habit of being unable to enjoy anything for what it is. When they manage to develop a villain to the point of becoming interesting characters, those characters are then cut out of the picture to add powerful consequences to a story (the death of Sabretooth, the many deaths of Magneto) or converted into (if not good, then at least) a brighter shade of grey (consider the number of foes converted into team members over the years).
The caretakers of the X-products should be thankful, then, that they’ll always have one hollowpoint bullet in the chamber, one foe that will always retain its menace. There’s no softening, no sympathy. The only risk is overusing them until their metronomic march becomes a comfortable rhythm to foot-tap to rather than a war drum. Of course, we’re talking Sentinels. Sentinels are the epitome of X-villainy. The X-Men by design are there to protect a world that hates and fears them; since their all-new, all-different days they’ve been as much about clashes of ideology than anything else. Being able to, on some level, expect a personal motivation for committing evil (Magneto’s wounded rage, for example) invites the idea that these characters are just misguided — that, had things taken one left turn instead of right, they might be totally different and the world might be a different place. Not so with Sentinels. Sentinels are hate and fear incarnate, unflinching and unable to be reasoned with. They’re physical manifestations of humanity’s unwillingness to accept the change that mutantcy represents, because Sentinels themselves will never change. They’ll hunt and they’ll kill until they’re broken. Period.
After the mutant island of Genosha got decimated, Sentinels went on ice for a while. As well they should have, because trying to follow that up with anything less than something globally catastrophic would have been underwhelming. In that time, though, the attitudes of humans toward mutants has been a curious thing. Every year or so, it seems like things have flip-flopped. One day, the X-Men are putting on their silly costumes and going out to fight Fin Fang Foom to pointedly astonish the public and show that they’re superheroes just like the Fantastic Four. The next day, they’re walled in their compound by the government as a protected resource thanks to House of M. The third day, they’re regarded as domestic terrorists, but not the anthrax kind. They’re like a Montana militia bunkered out in some woodsy shithole — too distant to be directly threatening, but you still can’t help but imagine that they’re scum.
Continued belowThis is a far cry from the franchise’s commercial peak (as a print mechanism anyway) in the 1990s, when the X-Men were unambiguously regarded as terror commandos at the forefront of genetic insurrection. The thing I remember most about the 80s and the 90s, X-wise, is the pervading sense of nihilism. In the grim days of the 1980s — the ones just to the left of synth-pop and Wall Street — this made sense. The mutants-as-victims concept fitted in with a broader downturn of hope in the shadow of Reaganomics and Chernobyl and Protect and Survive. In the more optimistic (or, in other sectors, apolitical) 90s, though, the X-gloom persisted. If anything, humans seemed to get even more rabid in their persecution, more threatening in their rhetoric. It seems we’ve now returned to that point. The X-Men aren’t just irritants to humanity, a reminder of impending genetic obsolescence: they’re the enemy. The entire world is against them now. And the entire world has Sentinels.
Which is, of course, not what Schism‘s marketing says it’s about. It’s supposed to be the X-Men Civil War, the great shattering between conflicting subfactions. It’s not really that, though; at least, not yet. The first issue of Schism is, in fact, exactly what you wouldn’t expect. Instead of showing the ways that the cord has frayed, it creates a new status quo that almost demands solidarity amongst mutants. The X-Men in particular are besieged by threats from within the mutant community and without — the ‘without’ being, er, everyone. This is the sort of apocalyptic end-of-days peril that the 90s X-Men existed in constantly, but then, it was what prompted them to watch each other’s backs. How is there any sensible way to split the X-Men in two when the overwhelming majority of the world is prepared to wipe them off the face of things completely?
That’s not to say that this scenario is a wash on a conceptual level. In terms of its execution? The idea that anything has actually been building to this is, at best, tenuous. Our villains here are a character who seems to be entirely new, and one whose return has had no hinting that I’ve noticed. The plot here is literally hinged upon “a sudden action of vast consequences,” not “a steady build-up that comes to a head.” The sole indicators we receive that things might fracture come in the banter between Logan and Cyclops, where Cyclops is earnest and stiff-spined, and Logan is slouchy and grouchy. Which is to say, the two of them act as they’ve acted for about a bazillion years now, during all those issues where things weren’t supposedly about to split into rival tribes.
Schism could go places. It’s not poorly written, and Carlos Pacheco is a fine artist who manages to rise to the unenviable task of “draw an issue that’s mostly people either sitting around talking, or walking around talking.” Jason Aaron does manage to convey a degree of thoughtfulness regarding the characters’ voices that we honestly haven’t seen in an X-Men comic in years. But as an event, the jury is still out. It’s not really a reset button — it’s a panic one. And while panic is good for an adrenaline surge, the back matter of the issue promises a new status quo for the next few years. But then, so did everything else.
Final Verdict: 7.0 – Well-done but who knows where this is going
