Comic Review: X-Men Hope #1

Reviewed by Optimus Douche
Check out the original and all his others over at Aintitcoolnews!

X-MEN: HOPE #1
Writer: Duane Swierczynski
Artist: Steve Dillon
Publisher: Marvel Comics

Remember the great training montages from 80s movies like “Karate Kid” (“You’re the Best”) or any of the “Rocky” movies, those brief moments where our protagonist goes from zero to hero all in the course of two minutes and thirty-five seconds? If you went to the movies for those moments alone then you’ll love X-MEN HOPE, because it is basically the price we used to pay for the movies with training montages, minus the movie.


I’m not quite sure what I disliked most about this book. It could be the fact the most important child born in mutantdom, the only mutant born after M-DAY, grows from child to adult in four short vignettes and throughout it all we learn nothing about her. It could be the fact that it felt like Swierczynski and Dillon, both accomplished comic professionals, dialed in this issue more haphazardly then when I used to drunk dial ex-girlfriends. Most likely though it’s the fact that this is the seed for the next big mutant event, X-MEN: SECOND COMING and it feels as though it was planted with about as much care as a Mexican gardener high on peyote.

Truly if Marvel wanted to service this new lynchpin character and introduce her to those of us that have shunned her past exploits as a baby in the ancillary mutant titles, they should have actually taken the time to introduce her in a full blown out mini-series. I understand comic fans are hard to please; we perpetually bitch about padded titles and mini-series that are in place simply for the sake of sales. However, this isn’t just any character; she is clearly going to change the future of all mutant books in some capacity. That says to me she definitely warrants more than 5 pages per epoch of her life. I haven’t seen a kid grow faster since the FAMILY TIES brat went from baby to Kindergartner over one summer.

Essentially each 5 page story shows that Hope and Cable are close. Really, that’s what happened in each story. Cable shows her how to fight to survive and they close each vignette with “a very special” heartfelt awwww. These are the same lessons the X-Men have been getting for years inside the Danger Room, except now we see them without the Danger Room.

In the end analysis X-MEN: HOPE gives me very little, so I hereby rename this one and done (thankfully) X-MEN: NOPE.