Astonishing X-Men = Surprisingly mediocre

I just read Giant Sized Astonishing X-Men #1 last night. The guy at the comic shop and I bitched about it being forever delayed, and how we already knew that a certain someone was going to bite it. Well, maybe they didn’t “bite it” per se, but they’re floating around in Limbo, or at least on a gigantic bullet.

Like much of the Whedon / Cassidy run, the storytelling had high ambitions, cinematic storytelling scopes, all the really fun stuff. Well, except stories to match the ambitions. And deadlines to keep readers caring.

Maybe I need to go back and reread their run on this supposedly “flagship” X-book, because the long gaps in between issues left me having to refresh myself going in, and the constant series of cliffhangers made those waits too ridiculous to care. They took a favorite team of mine and made it into mush.

I wanted to care. I really did. You had great characters in a fantastic science fiction story. But the story idea superseded the execution. Chalk it up to Marvel’s disease (Shared by DC at times, too) – hype the shit out of a book, then make it too consistently late to care. Secret War, Daredevil: Father, any number of other books unable to sustain themselves because the writers and artists couldn’t be bothered to respect their fans, instead dragging year long stories into years long.

Warren Ellis and Simon Bianchi’s run has a “regular” schedule on the Marvel website. But I’ve got some issues with it going in. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully, the storytelling and execution step up to the plate, and actually bother to respect fans enough to not get sidetracked by other projects. If this is going to be Marvel’s quintessential X-book, then they should treat it as such – not some long-form vanity project, but a book able to sustain a deadline and keep fans caring about the storyline within.