ALIEN VS. X-MEN #1 REVIEW: MUTANTS, XENOMORPHS AND A WHOLE LOTTA BAD DECISIONS
·Al Mega
WEPAAAA! Somebody at Marvel looked at the X-Men, looked at the Xenomorphs and apparently decided mutantkind was having way too peaceful a week. Alien vs. X-Men #1 could have easily been one of those crossover books where everybody smashes their action figures together, Wolverine goes SNIKT, an Alien drools on somebody and boom, collect your six bucks. Kieron Gillen ain’t doing that. My dude immediately finds the nasty little idea hiding inside this whole premise: what happens when the universe’s most adaptable killing organism gets access to mutant DNA? Oh, that’s foul. I like it.
Gillen drops Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, Wolverine and Kitty Pryde into trouble damn near immediately, and that’s exactly where this book needs to live. We know the X-Men. We know the Xenomorphs. Nobody needs a damn TED Talk before somebody gets attacked. The story moves, but Gillen still gives the mutants enough personality that this doesn’t become twenty-something pages of screaming and acid blood. These people have history, egos, friendships and disagreements, and you feel that underneath the madness. Better yet, mutant powers aren’t treated like automatic cheat codes. Gillen starts asking what those abilities mean when you’re dealing with something whose whole biological hustle is adapting through its host. Yeah. Now we got a comic.
Geraldo Borges came ready to get disgusting with it. WEPA! His Xenomorphs have that slick, biomechanical nastiness they need, but he doesn’t let them disappear into a pile of black shapes whenever the action gets crazy. You can follow these fights. Wolverine moves like Wolverine. Storm commands a page differently than Psylocke. Cannonball doesn’t suddenly fight like Gambit because everybody has to fit inside the same action choreography. That’s important with this many mutants running around. Then Borges starts playing with what Xenomorph biology can become after mutant biology gets involved, and THAT is where the visual concept starts earning the crossover instead of merely wearing the license.
Andrew Dalhouse deserves some damn love here because this book could’ve gotten ugly in the wrong way real fast. You got deep space, black Xenomorph bodies, psychic energy, claws, lasers, rain, explosions, mutant powers popping off all over the place, and somehow the pages still know how to breathe. That ain’t luck. Dalhouse keeps the space scenes cold and nasty, lets the Xenomorphs melt into the darkness like they belong there, then lets the mutants cut through all that gloom with color that pops without turning the book into Times Square on acid. And VC’s Travis Lanham? My man keeps this whole loud-ass circus readable. Screams, telepathy, alarms, sound effects, everybody yelling, everything moving, and I never once had to play detective trying to figure out which balloon came next. That’s clean work, fam. Comics already got enough chaos. I shouldn’t need Google Maps to read a fight scene.
The sauce here is that Gillen and the crew actually understand the Xenomorph ain’t just some ugly space cockroach for the X-Men to punch through a wall. Nah, fam. Its whole biological hustle is the damn weapon. That’s where this gets nasty. Wolverine’s healing factor? Usually that’s the cheat code. Here, that could turn into one hell of a problem. Mutant evolution, the thing that makes these characters special, suddenly becomes the exact thing the Xenomorph can twist against them. Every host changes the game. Every power opens up another ugly possibility. WEPA, now you got my attention! That’s the comic right there. The only thing holding it back a little is that Gillen got a LOT of people in the kitchen, so a few reactions fly by before they can really hit. I could’ve used another beat here and there. Still, I’ll take a book moving with too much heat over one spending twenty pages stretching before the damn fight starts.
So yeah, Alien vs. X-Men #1 got me. This could have been dumb fun and I probably would’ve been cool with that, because c’mon, Wolverine fighting Xenomorphs? Take my damn money. But Gillen, Borges, Dalhouse and Lanham found an actual reason for these universes to collide, while Claremont, Messina and Beredo remind us that cosmic horror has been living in X-Men DNA for a long minute. It isn’t flawless, the cast is crowded and sometimes the story wants to sprint when I wouldn’t mind it walking for another page, but there’s a wicked concept underneath all the claws, teeth and acid. Mutant evolution meets Xenomorph evolution. What could possibly go wrong? Fam, EVERYTHING. That’s why I’m coming back!
CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Geraldo Borges
Color Artist: Andrew Dalhouse
Backup Story, “Belles of Hell, Part 1” Writer: Chris Claremont
Backup Artist: Dave Messina
Backup Color Artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: VC’s Travis Lanham
Cover Artist: Ryan Stegman & Marcelo Maiolo
Editor: Martin Biro
Editor in Chief: C.B. Cebulski
Publisher: Marvel Comics / 20th Century Studios
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