Wednesday 26 August 2020

X-Men/Dark Ages Free Comic Book Day #1 (2020) Comic Book Review

 


X-Men/Dark Ages #1 is an issue that confused me. I'll be honest, I haven't kept up with Marvel outside of Spider-Man in a really long time. And so I have no idea what's going on. I was sort of keeping myself informed on what was going on with the X-Men while House of X and Powers of X were going on but I haven't read an X-Men comic since I picked up X-Men Red #3 back in 2018. But otherwise I have no idea what's even going on in the Marvel Universe right now. Which is probably for the best, because I am completely lost here.

When Brad brought this book to me a few weeks ago, I was under the impression, based on the cover alone that it was an X-Men comic put out for Free Comic Book Day and that would be it. Nope, because the X-Men story in it, doesn't include any of the characters on the front cover.  In fact there are no X-Men in the X-Men story. There isn't even much of a story there at all. The other story however is a bit different.

I like the concept of Dark Ages, an upcoming storyline that will apparently affect the entire Marvel Universe, not just Iron Man as it seems to be depicted in this issue. The concept is that something shuts off all the power in New York City, maybe even the world. Not just power, but communications and any kind of technology, including Iron Man's armor, basically sending the world back into the "Dark Ages". This is just a brief introduction with Iron Man and Pepper Potts as the focus. Not usually something you see for the opening of a comic book story. Well, it is Marvel after all so even if they're marketing sucks, they're at least creative when it comes to come up with new situations to put the characters into.

Final Thoughts and Rating: Because this is a Free Comic Book Day comic that is really just a preview for upcoming Marvel events, this isn't going to be a long review. I'm not really sure how to rate it either. There's two stories in it so I guess I could just split the difference. You can skip it if you want since I don't think it's actually going to be necessary for you to read it if you're picking up X of Swords (the X-Men story arc presented here) or Dark Ages. The cover is completely misleading and the X-Men "story" isn't much of a story, so I'm going to give this book 5/10 stars because the Dark Ages preview is pretty cool. I just wish Marvel had used a cover that reflected Dark Ages instead of just a generic X-Men cover. And like I said, I was completely lost with what's happening in the X-Men portion of the issue since I haven't been keeping up with the X-Men since 2018. 

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