A+X #1 by Slott, Loeb, Keown, & Garney

Want to see your classic Marvel characters team up? Click the jump to see who’s first.

A+X #1
Written by Jeph Loeb & Dan Slott
Art by Dale Keown & Ron Garney
Published by Marvel  
 

A direct spin off from AVX, the new comic book is called A+X. Unlike, its predecessor this book is not about The Avengers fighting the X-Men anymore. It’s about The Avengers collaborating with the X-Men in team up stories. What you should appreciate from this issue is how the writers, Dan Slott and Jeph Loeb broke down the characters for their pairings. It’s a fun first issue, which might make a fun comic book for future issues.

Synopsis: One member from each of the teams joins another for an epic team-up.

Good: What I really admire from both stories in this issue is that the writers broken down the characters they were using and I mean seriously broke the characters down to the foundation of what they’re made of; why they are so iconic in the Marvel Universe. I appreciate the time and effort to pair these characters up because their reasoning for doing so really shows in this first issue.

For Captain America and Cable, both of these characters are rooted in time, both literal and conceptual. Cable literally has the ability to time jump and Captain America having come from a past where he fought in World War II against the Nazis. This is an element that you see immediately in Dan Slott’s story. If you have ever heard of this phrase, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” you’ll see how it relates to Slott’s story telling between Cable and Captain America. SPOILER ALERT Cable jumps back to the middle of World War II to stop a time jumper who wants to make mutants of the early 1940’s extinct and at the same time, Captain America is staking out the Nazis plans to use robots to win World War II. The “uh-ah” moment comes when the moral paths of each characters coincide; Captain America is fighting against the Nazi world domination and ceasing the extinction of Jews, while Cable is ceasing the attempts of a mutant hating time jumper from making mutants extinct in the future. “…the more things stay the same.” and in this case “History repeats itself.”

When you really look at the pairing of Captain America and Cable, they are truly a perfect match.

The second team up is Wolverine and Hulk and is more of a casual encounter between them. Now, at this point it’s like, well where’s the story? There is a story, it just happens so quickly and ends with a cliff hanger. Most of the interaction in this team up takes place in the dialogue between the two characters but you may be wondering why in the world are they paired up together but don’t worry it does makes sense, and you’ll begin to appreciate Jeph Loeb’s break down of the characters. SPOILER ALERT Wolverine is about to eat a piece of cake, Hulk appears and says it’s his cake. It’s about to be a cake war, until future versions of themselves appear from a time jump. After, the present Hulk and Wolverine beat down the future versions of themselves they resume their to cake war. Loeb distills these characters down to their basic core; Both heroes are stubborn, aggressive, and become extremely focused on one thing at a time. These are the ground level foundations of their personalities and Loeb takes advantage of that making these two characters, an interesting pair. On a serious note though, they’re basically comic relief from the previous story in this issue and with not really much to go on except for the fact that their personalities are compatible, yet clashing.

Both Dale Keown and Ron Garney deliver fresh clean artwork in this issue. I hope they both continue to put their all into this book as the comedic side of the story was rendered well by both pencillers. They deserve much praise for their work on this book.

Bad: Slott’s storytelling was a bit slow in the beginning. He may use the slow pace storytelling as a way of setting up the audience for the World War II situation but you want to get to the action as fast as you can for a team up comic book like this one.

As a Wolverine fan, you want to see this character be taken seriously as a bad ass. Loeb turned Wolverine into a comic relief character. Of course, Wolverine wasn’t alone because he had The Hulk to pull jokes as well. I can only assume that it was a move by Loeb to deviate from Slott’s “serious” writing at the beginning of the issue.  

I’m sure the next issue will have different pairings, but I would like to see a continuation with these characters down the line and would enjoy seeing their characters develop together with more storylines and hopefully Wolverine and Hulk will have a more concrete plots than an all out cake war.

Rating: 5/5 

What did you think of A+X #1? Are you reading this issue? Why or why not?

More images from this issue below.

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