“Get Ready To Rumble”
Creative Staff:
Story: Leah Williams
Art: Carlos Gomez
Colors: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: VC’s Travis Lanham
What They Say:
REFLECTIONS OF DEADLY VENGEANCE! Four deadly X-Women find themselves held captive and fighting for their lives…and more importantly, fighting to get revenge on the @#$%#$@ dead man who did this to them!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I went into this series pretty wary ainsce the last series I read in full was the original Exiles series so I’m woefully out of date – though my X-Men reading began back in the early 1980s. This series has Leah Williams writing it and it’s an excellent and fun work right out of the gate, even if I’m just a bit leery of the setting for it in the back half. She’s got the dialogue, one-liner’s down well, and a sense of character and playfulness that reminds me of what I loved from part of the 1980s era. Carlos Gomez puts in some fantastic pages throughout with a great sense of layout and strong flow for it all, especially with as much action as there is. I love the character designs and interpretation here and just everything with how Bryan Valenza colors it, giving Gomez’s work even more vibrancy.
Enjoying the first issue far more than I expected, the second issue undercuts itself a bit by revealing after a few pages that we’re seeing everything through a recap as the group is essentially on trial for nearly causing a war with the vampires. It’s not a bad framing but it definitely reduces some of the tension, even though you know none of the cast of characters were going to die anyway. But it sets up something that bonds this group together a bit more since they’re all facing the same panel of “elder statesmen” of mutantkind on Krakoa and it has an interesting feeling to it. And some, like Tabitha, just aren’t interested in playing the game here. Plus, it’s amusing in seeing them in an after-action event where Dazzler is all done up in a cheerleader costume that has us curious to see how we get there.
Where the bulk of this issue goes is in throwing the group into a bit of action material. They’ve survived the first round and we get plenty of snark and criticism over dating choices made here, but it moves quickly into them being put into a magical device that’s meant to kill them by copies of themselves. It’s fun and shows how they react to situations. The more interesting part is that we learn that the man behind this, Alex, is the son of Xarus who himself was sired by Dracula. And Xarus has moved into deal with Alex because what he’s done is going to cause a lot of problems with Dracula if he finds out, which I suspect he does at some point based on the after-action report labeled for Dracula’s eyes only, and I’m curious to see where all of that goes. It’s a decent balance to what the leading ladies are going through as they provide the action, at least until Alex gets involved at the very end.
In Summary:
I don’t think I enjoyed this issue as much as the last one because the series opened with a lot of good character stuff and things that just focused on the characters. Here, it’s all about the fight and the minor personality clashes between the four women, which is less interesting overall. It’s not a surprise or unexpected material but it’s also why I was more interested in the Kraoka bits and what we got from Alex with the behind-the-scenes look at events. It’s a solid issue and the fight material is really good with some great visuals – especially the color design – so it’s a strong read throughout that delivers a lot of fun.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 9+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: October 26th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
