House of X

“One Down”
All-New X-Men #26-29 (2014)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Pencils by Stuart Immonen
Inks by Wade von Grawbadger

Stuart Immonen has been working steadily in mainstream comics since the early 1990s but has over the course of this decade become one of the best and most widely imitated artists in the industry. If Marvel has a “house style” in the mid-to-late 2010s, it’s a post-Immonen look, and the two artists drawing the initial wave of Jonathan Hickman X-Men comics – R.B. Silva and Pepe Larraz – are highly gifted pencilers whose aesthetics nevertheless boil down to “I can’t believe it’s not Stuart Immonen.”

It certainly takes a lot of skill to mimic Immonen. His draftsmanship is excellent, he’s brilliant with facial expressions and body language, and he’s particularly gifted in rendering lighting for dramatic effect. Larraz and Silva, while each having some identifiable stylistic flair on their own, have come to draw their pages with very Immonen-ish designs and rhythms, and the particular line weights of his illustrations. They didn’t always draw quite like this, so it seems like a reasonable assumption that they’ve adjusted to market demands. If that’s the case, the very fact that they are drawing the ultra-hyped House of X and Powers of X launch would prove that to be a winning strategy.

Immonen himself has not worked for Marvel for over a year, and has shifted his attention to other projects after completing a run with Dan Slott on Amazing Spider-Man with issue #800. This was the culmination of a period in which Immonen was clearly Marvel’s top artist, during which he only worked on high profile comics with top writers – Fear Itself with Matt Fraction, All-New X-Men with Brian Michael Bendis, Captain America with Rick Remender, and Star Wars with Jason Aaron. Though Fear Itself was the flagship title of a crossover event, his work on All-New X-Men was his true star-making work. Immonen, whose aesthetics have shifted over the years while always retaining core strengths, had fully solidified into what is now his iconic style with All-New X-Men. His style was a fresh look for the X-Men – very earthy and grounded in its action, and elegant in rendering the emotional details of Bendis’ very soapy approach to the series.

All-New X-Men #26 is the opening chapter of Immonen’s final arc on the series before handing the book over to rising star Mahmud Asrar. The story is mostly about the return of the future Brotherhood, who were the antagonists of the “Battle of the Atom” crossover from a year before. The primary cast of All-New X-Men were the time-displaced original five X-Men from the ‘60s – teenage versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman, and Angel. They were brought to the present by the adult Beast to emotionally torture the adult Cyclops after Cyclops appeared to have murdered their mutual father figure, Charles Xavier.

The future Brotherhood, who originally present themselves as the X-Men of the future, are mainly focused on trying to get the original X-Men to return to their place in the timeline, but turn out to be driven more by a hatred of the X-Men and their failures. The future Brotherhood is led by a son of Charles Xavier who looks just like his father and has all of his powers, and has a grudge against the X-Men for not honoring his dad and his vision. “They stand on my grave and they speak of his legacy and they have done nothing but make a mockery of it,” he explains near the end of this arc. “The X-Men murdered him and then went on like nothing happened. They moved into his house and they took his money and they didn’t even have the courtesy to keep his name on the school he built.”

Charles Junior may be a psychopath with childish grudges, but he’s not entirely wrong. His read on the X-Men and their reckless behavior – “You don’t think about how your actions affect the future!” – is entirely correct. Bendis was affectionally critiquing years of X-Men comics, and tying together the larger themes of family and legacy at the center of his X-Men. Everything in the Bendis period comes down to the question of what the X-Men ought to be in the absence of Xavier, and there’s never any tidy answer. Charles Junior, who turns out to be the secret love child of Xavier and Mystique, has valid concerns about what the X-Men do in his father’s name but despite appearances, he’s very much the product of Xavier’s absence. He looks just like his father and is also a powerful psychic, but he lacks his old man’s moral compass and humanitarian vision. He’s much more like his spiteful and manipulative mother.

There are two sequences in the “One Down” arc that stand out, almost entirely as a result of Immonen’s top-notch artwork. The first is the opening scene of #26, in which the adult Cyclops checks in on the teenage Jean Grey in her quarters. The two characters had mostly avoided one another up until this point in Bendis’ story. It’s very uncomfortable for Cyclops to be in the presence of the teen version of his late wife, and ultra weird for the teen Jean to be around the adult version of the guy she finds out she marries later in life.

Immonen illustrates this scene with remarkable nuance – you hardly even need to read the dialogue to pick up on exactly how the characters feel and are relating to one another. Immonen captures the odd emotional reality of the situation, and the confusing intimacy of their conversation. Cyclops feels an easy rapport with any version of Jean, but is doing everything he can to behave appropriately around her despite his feelings. Jean can’t help but be attracted to him, and admits she prefers the adult Cyclops to his younger self. “It’s like, instead of hoping you’d grow up to become this man, you DID become this man,” she tells him. He does the right thing and pulls away in this moment, and Jean is visibly frustrated.

The second is the extended sequence in #27 in which the future Brotherhood ambush the X-Men in their own home, which at the time is the former Weapon X facility in Canada. Raze, the future son of Mystique and Wolverine, has entered the building under the guise of a wounded X-23, warning about the presence of a shape-shifter. Triage, the X-Men’s young healer, tends to her wounds. “You’re the healer?,” Raze says as he transforms into his true form and slashes his throat. “You first.” Immonen nails the beats of this reveal, and then goes on to perfectly render a sense of claustrophobia and terror as the Brotherhood cut out the power in the facility and start picking off team members.

Bendis is known for writing to artists’ strengths, and it seems clear that he took note of Immonen’s skill for lighting when deciding to set a key action scene in an underground bunker lit only by creepy pilot lights. Colorist Marte Gracia does great work here too, presenting all of these scenes in a wash of dull red ambiance. A lot of superhero comics suffer for a vagueness of setting, but Immonen and crew keep you in fully aware of physical space in these issues, and it enhances the overall tense and anxious feeling of the story.