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X-Men #8 Welcomes home the New Mutants
There are three constants when it comes to the X-Men.
- Death is a revolving door for them, now more than ever.
- They will always have a space adventure after a while.
- The New Mutants will always cause problems.
This issue of X-Men utilizes all three of these concepts to varying degrees, while also giving us a fun adventure that the core title has been missing for a number of issues while it’s been focusing on building the world and mystique, no pun intended, of the X-Men’s new status quo.
The Brood are Back
Very recently, the New Mutants went on their own little space adventure in their team book by Jonathan Hickman and Rod Reis and Hikman expands on the aftermath of their adventure by presenting one of Wolfsbane’s trinkets from the trip: A Brood King Egg. Historically, these eggs have caused the Brood to frenzy and go to war just to attain it.
Hickman is very likely using this to continue the world building of the X-Men as the Brood have been longtime enemies of the Mutants, as well one of the few other races in the Marvel Universe that have their own mutations in the form of Brood Kings and Mutant-adjacent characters like Broo, one of the former students at the Xavier School who also appears in this issue.
At the same time, Hickman seems to be sowing the seeds for a potential return of Emperor Vulcan, maybe? The youngest Summers brother, Gabriel aka Vulcan, has had a few appearances since Dawn of X started, but Hickman makes overt references to his battle with Black Bolt by reintroducing The Fault in early pages of this book.
The Fault is a tear in reality that leaks dark matter and the Brood have set up around it as a breeding ground. Previously, Vulcan was believed to have died in there, but it’s revealed in one of Hickman, Clayton Cowles and Tom Mueller’s information pages that Vulcan never died and it’s very likely that his memories are within the nightmare that he keeps having.
Mahmud Asrar does the art for this issue and does a great job of selling the massive scale of the incoming Brood invasion with wide shots of their army of dead Acanti space-whales getting closer and closer until we see the parasites crawling in and out of the non-living creatures. Sunny Gho’s coloring gives it all a far out feel with the hazy blues of The Fault in the background and muted reds of the Acanti.
Brood Invasion Force
Asrar and Gho also give us really good scenes of the New Mutants fighting off the Brood Hordes when they invade Krakoa. Magik and Mirage slice through and loose arrows into the monsters in very high action panels until Cyclops and Jean Grey arrive to help. Asrar and Gho give us an awesome moment of Cyclops shooting his blasts through Magik’s portals and shows how well their powers can work in tandem.
One of the best shots in the book has to be a wide angle shot of all of the Summers brothers, Jean and Broo sitting in the cockpit of a ship as they take the King Egg and blast into the stars. It’s definitely one of those rare, once in a comic run, kind of shots that I do not believe we’ve ever gotten. I don’t even think that Cyclops has ever fought Vulcan either!