Marvel’s Maximum X-Men #1 lands on 2 December, and its pitch is as old as the mutants themselves: a world that hates and fears them, and needs them anyway. In the wreckage of the Avengers: Armageddon event, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have disbanded and public feeling against superheroes has hit an all-time high. So Storm puts together a new team of X-Men to do the Avengers’ job for them, presumably without the Avengers’ pension scheme or the use of the mansion.
Christopher Yost writes and Tony S. Daniel draws. Yost knows the territory, having co-written New X-Men and X-Force with Craig Kyle and worked on the X-Men: Evolution cartoon before that, and Daniel recently made his own return to the mutants on Jed MacKay’s X-Men. Yost has promised underdog heroes taking on Avengers-sized threats with what he calls “a classic Claremont vibe”, which is roughly what every X-Men writer since 1991 has promised, and still exactly the right thing to aim for. Daniel says he discovered the team through Giant-Size X-Men #1 in the fourth grade, so he has been rehearsing for this gig for some decades.
The opening storyline, The Avenger Situation, runs to five parts and pitches the new team into a Negative Zone invasion. Annihilus leads off, which is a curious choice, since the insectoid tyrant of the Negative Zone has spent most of the past six decades making life miserable for the Fantastic Four. Yost has said that a number of villains were discussed before they settled on him. Issue two, out on 13 January 2027, sees the Negative Zone burst out over Atlanta, bringing Blastaar and the Night Lord along for the ride, while the solicitation teases something called Retribution as the real threat and introduces a brand-new mutant who picks the worst possible moment to make her debut. Storm, Wolverine and Butterfly are confirmed on the team, with the full line-up to be revealed in the first issue, which runs to 32 pages for $4.99.
The book sits inside the X-Men: Shadows of Tomorrow line alongside X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and X-Men United, so the mutant shelf at your local comic shop is about to get a little more crowded. Whether the market wants yet another X-team book is a fair question. Then again, Marvel has rarely been accused of under-supplying mutants, and a straight-ahead action title with a clear villain and a clear job is a more inviting jumping-on point than most.
There’s a nice irony in the X-Men stepping into the Avengers’ boots. For the first half of the 1970s their own title was nothing but reprints, the Marvel equivalent of being left on the shelf at a jumble sale, until Len Wein and Dave Cockrum’s Giant-Size relaunch in 1975, the very comic that hooked young Tony Daniel. Half a century later they’re the team the world calls when the Avengers stop answering. The world, being Marvel’s world, will doubtless still hate them for it.
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