Marvel Comics introduced their Age of Ultron event two weeks ago and must have thought to themselves, “wait a minute, the X-Men need their own event!” Lucky us; or maybe unlucky, considering how sloppy dueling events can go. We take a look at X-Termination and ask ourselves, is it good?
X-Termination #1 (Marvel Comics)
Typically when a major motion picture is written by more than two writers you have a problem. It usually means there were heavy rewrites, but in some cases it just means a producer kept hiring new people to touch up certain scenes. When it comes to comics it’s a bit dicier to decipher the credits page. This book has three writers, which could mean they all sat in a room and wrote it together, or they couldn’t figure who was the sole creator and slapped all the names on the book and called it a day. Either way, it’s kind of a bad sign in most cases. Then again, with Marvel’s writers summits I suppose it’s a usual thing these days, at least with events.
Marvel sure is infatuated with multiple dimensions lately.
Gambit is such a dick.
Pak, Lui, and Lapham are all writers of the story because this series is combining three series. They are Astonishing X-Men, X-Terminated who come from the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and the dimension-hopping X-Treme X-Men. All three of these properties have varying degrees of quality and a whole hell of a lot of X’s to go around. Lapham takes writing duties for this issue.
What it looks like inside a Celestial…with special goggles of course!
This issue opens with Nightcrawler, or the Age of Apocalypse version, wanting to go home. He teams up with Dark Beast to work on doing just that. Thankfully he has a whole plan all ready to go. Unfortunately Nightcrawler has some mental issues concerning his long lost family and he mucks up the whole plan. This all leads to the three X-Men teams teaming up to prevent the many universes from being destroyed. Of course it does.
Bitch, don’t kill my vibe!
It all screams like a cash grab, at least as far as this issue goes, largely because it’s all kind of a mess. This issue serves as an explanation for joining these teams together but also the creation of a new dimension-cop enemy. At least that’s what they appear to be. Either way, the reasoning behind the entire plot is pretty flimsy. If it’s this easy to destroy every dimension in one fell swoop then I’d advise heroes to stop sneezing.
This dude can’t stop dying!
- Celestial internal organs are nifty!
- Weak story
- So-so pencil work
David Lopez does a serviceable job on pencils, but I can’t help but think he was rushed on this one. Much like the plot of this issue, everything barrels down to get all the characters from point A to point B. Sure Nightcrawler has some psychosis going around, but he’s so up and down it’s hard to read. This “event,” if we can call it that, doesn’t have one epic moment either. It reads like any other half hearted actionfest of a comic book.
Is It Good?
Nope. It’s a bit of a messy rush job to get the event started.
Join the AIPT Patreon
Want to take our relationship to the next level? Become a patron today to gain access to exclusive perks, such as:
- ❌ Remove all ads on the website
- 💬 Join our Discord community, where we chat about the latest news and releases from everything we cover on AIPT
- 📗 Access to our monthly book club
- 📦 Get a physical trade paperback shipped to you every month
- 💥 And more!