- Cover by Arthur Adams
- Written by Brian Wood
- Art by David Lopez
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BEWARE OF SPOILERS
Its time for part three of the time-bending ‘Battle of the Atom’ event currently taking place across all the X-comics in the Marvel Universe. Part 3 falls under the banner of the headlining ‘X-Men’ volume 4 series currently under the team of writer Brian Wood and artist David Lopez so take over from Brian Bendis who wrote the previous two issues and Stuart Immonen whose designs for the young X-team have been the basis behind artwork in both previous chapters in the story.
Part 3 still finds us under the smaller character moments that ‘Battle’ storyline has to offer. The titular battle is definitely looming on the horizon but for now we’re hurtling towards it via a lot of interplay between the various X-Men teams that are currently existing in the one time period.
Part 2 saw the teenage Cyclops and Jean Grey escaping from the pack to avoid being sent back to their own time to face an inevitable mind wipe from Prof. X.
Part 3 finds them running hard and fast knowing that as soon as their presence is missed the others will use all their combined powers to find them.
Of course before we get to the chase there’s the small matter of dealing with the bombshell ending of part 2 with the reveal that in the future Jean Grey is still alive leaving her only absent from the present day team.
The existence of a descendent of Charles Xavier is remaining brilliantly un-investigated at this stage. There’s a story waiting to be told there but now is not the time, there’s too much to examine around Jean to look at the wider picture at this stage.
The story continues to unfold at a steady pace throughout the issue allowing for a well defined beginning, middle and end. There’s still only a short space of time taking place in this issue but there’s enough development that it never feels like a waste of the readers time. This story will explode at some point but it’s going to hinge on all this character development currently taking place.
The artwork by David Lopez came as a bit of a surprise to me though not in a bad way as this is my first experience of his art so for a Marvel comic and certainly an X-Men comic I found it to be a very contemporary comic style. There’s a more rendered feel to the characters so some of the design cues from the ‘All-New X-Men’ series are lost a little in translation but it’s still a great visual style for the book and all importantly the multiple character retain their individual looks.
The crux of this story is now the factions that are developing amongst the various teams but continues to skirt around the issue of the paradox being created by young X-Men being in the present day. The story in this part brings the Cyclops led team back in to the fold as so far they have been fairly absent during this event.
If the story follows suit I think that from here we’ll now jump right back in to the action now that we almost fully understand all the motivations that the major players have.
If you’re not yet reading ‘Battle of the Atom’ you really need to go back to the beginning to get the full impact so do so now and get reading!
7/10
