X-Men #16 by Jonathan Hickman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Large sections of this comic consist of nothing more than headshots in a nine panel grid as people discuss things in meetings. There’s absolutely no action at all. The closest thing to action is two Ents, for want of a better word, having a silent conversation.
And it’s brilliant.
If it wasn’t impossible due to the timescales involved, I’d say this was put together as a two fingered salute to that Twitter post that did the rounds recently complaining about three pages of talking heads being a waste of space in a super hero comic. Super hero comics do not need to be 22 pages of people hitting each other. Sometimes they can slow down and be 22 pages of people having conversations, and after the roller coaster ride of X Of Swords, that’s exactly what we needed.
Personally, I very much appreciate Hickman taking the time to take stock of the new status quo. There are now a LOT of new mutants on Earth, and a whole new island, which does want to make friends with the existing one. This is an interesting new dynamic, and one wonders if it’s something Moira has accounted for…
And then there’s the election of a new X-Men team. The fact that the team’s going to be elected by the inhabitants of Krakoa means that the make up of the team could be very interesting indeed.
All in all this is an excellent issue, stunningly illustrated by the superlative Phil Noto.
Random Ramblings Of A Ragamuffin 