X-Men: Red #1

By / / Comics

Making a pun out of the X-Men’s home on Mars, Marvel Comics relaunches X-Men: Red as an assortment of mutants are gathered together to keep the peace on Mars, now known to the mutants living on the terraformed world as Planet Arrako. It’s an X-Men comic with Magneto (now back to his traditional costume), so it got my attention, but for someone with only a passing interest in a minimal of recent X-Men stories there’s quite a bit of confusing plot that assumes the reader knows exactly what’s going on.

We are introduced to various entities on the planet who each seem to have their own agenda. Storm, who beat some kind of doppelganger, is now the Queen of Mars (but only sort of wants to be), Magneto is looking to be left alone. Abigail Brand is looking for a mutant police force, Sunspot is running some kind of disco casino, and Vulcan and Thunderbird are looking to cause trouble.

There’s also quite a bit of time spent on the politics of the Great Ring, the ruling council of the planet which Storm oversees, and conflicting interests over war or peace. I’ll admit, this (and the weird Storm vs. Storm segment) is where the comic lost me. I assume these pieces will fit together eventually, but I don’t know that I’ll stick around long enough to see what that looks like.

[Marvel, $4.99]

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