X-Men: Battle of the Atom #1

X-Men: Battle of the Atom #1 by Brian Bendis

Artists include (For the whole event):

Frank Cho, Stuart Immonen, Chris Bachalo, David Lopez, Giuseppe Camuncoli

The cover is really an interesting piece with all the contrasting colors and whatnot. I don’t really get why Storm and Wolverine get blank eyes where all the new characters at the top (one of them actually reminds me of Xorn) do have them. So it’s almost three covers combined together, and it makes it look almost a bit disjointed. Overall though, it does catch the eye and show off the cast in a colorful way. 3.5/5.

We open with Illiana (Magick) jumping into the future, which is never a good idea! We see a group of heroes (?) fighting Sentinels. Lemme see how to react to this….uh….

-A blue demon with a gattling gun

-A Monstrous looking beastial Iceman who kinda looks like a solidified yeti

-The Xorn looking guy shooting energy blasts

-Deadpool, looking a lot older with black glasses, is he blind? He looks right out of Old Man Logan or something.

This second page looks really cool honestly, especially seeing these neat new characters. I have no problem with them introducing new x-men characters and whatnot, as long as they remain interesting. I’ve seen some people complain about all these teen mutants in Uncanny and Wolverine and X-men, but I think it’s just as fun to meet new characters as long as they are well written. I read the NYX miniseries about a teen with Chronokinesis and it was a really awesome book, even if it was a non-popular mutant. The writer and character development is what matters.

We then cut to a rebellious punk mutant with piercings and a star on her face riding mutant dinosaurs. Honestly, this entire book so far is screaming to me “This is why I love comics!!”

The X-men dive into action, literally from the sky. The x-men try to fight the monsters, and Jean uses her telepathy to figure out this villain’s backstory (in a series of visual panels). Just when you think things can’t get worse, the present sentinels show up! Kitty uses her power to move all of them out of the way, but the sentinels still cause massive destruction.

At this point, the Uncanny X-men show up, including the displaced Angel. They decide to work together and spend a few panels taking them out, and afterwards the woman who started this whole thing decides to give up. Younger Scott gets blasted at least twice and almost dies (I actually wouldn’t mind if he did), but the new healing mutant (Christopher Muse) from Cyke’s team saves him. There’s also this neat blur effect as the stress builds, which looks partly interesting and partly strange. Looking at the plot summary, apparently this also represents that reality is destabilizing.

Here’s something that doesn't make sense. When younger scott almost dies, the older scott ceases to exist. However, since this younger scott is from another timeline/universe, so how would killing him kill the present scott? Aren’t they supposed to be separate? Bendis seriously can’t follow how most of this time-travel stuff works, but I don’t blame him...it’s confusing.

The X-men decide that, after seeing this, that they need to send the original x-men back right away because they’ll cause a problem. Though technically this argument has already been going on for like a dozen issues...so I’d think they’d just let them stay even if it kills the current Scott (wouldn’t that solve a bunch of problems and almost be a good thing?).

Suddenly, the time machine goes off and...the Future X-men from the start step through! I like the designs for the future x-men, and I’ll probably talk about them more next time.

Overall, the art in this issue is top-notch, but I feel like the story is making very little sense to me. How is killing one version of cyclops going to screw up the whole universe and kill his 616 self? I almost want to try to find another example in marvel where the same thing has happened with no problem, I’m sure there is one. Overall I’m giving this issue a 7/10, and I want to check out the rest of the event and meet the future x-men. Next time is AN-XM #16 (which I still need to pick up), so I’ll review another book for the next review.