It just keeps getting more and more complicated. I love that! The thought-provoking ways the characters are developing is a joy for me to read. I am having a great deal of fun seeing the X-Men I dimly remember from my childhood dealing with the world of today. I have enough trouble dealing with it and I got here the hard way.

Still really enjoying this series. Wasn't as keen on the illustrations in #15 but I did like how the X-Men from the past actually looked like kids seeing as they're meant to be 16.

One of the more compelling elements of Bendis' All-New X-Men is the essentialist claims Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey make in this collection of books. Scott and Jean are the only two of the original five earnestly concerned about the consequences of returning to their actual time. They, in effect, argue that the terrifying events that define X-Men continuity (a slippery signifier to be sure) cannot be avoided, circumvented, or corrected. The radicality of their position antagonizes a fundamental aspect of time travel narratives. Scott and Jean believe that knowing the future is meaningless; the past is the past, and it cannot be undone.

By adopting this essentialist view of themselves, Scott and Jean voice the limits of heroic intervention in superhero comics. Scott and Jean's position works in direct contradiction to one of the dominant ideologies surrounding superheroes. The ways in which action (i.e. the ability and willingness to act) and agency are fetishized in superhero comics prevents readers from seeing the limits of action and intervention. If anything, characters like Logan (Wolverine) too often articulate the only brand of criticism that seems to exist when action does not work. Logan's position is not unlike the position many conservatives take when market forces don't sufficiently curb the world's injustices and inequalities: we did not go far enough. For Logan, the problem is not action unto itself; he never ruminates over the perceived efficacy of action. By his estimation the mistake, and by extension, the mistakes of many superheroes resides in the relative modesty of their action.

By contrast, Scott and Jean take a different tact. They recognize the futility of superhero action, and by doing so, potentially establish a new ethical frontier. While the presence of the original five X-Men produces a rupture, the X-Men from the present cannot see the boundaries of this rupture. It is not space and time that Scott and Jean disrupt, it is the fetishized notion that superhero action does something positive and meaningful.

*The reference to conservatives and market forces in paragraph 2 is a reference to several conservative appraisals of the Great Recession. They argue the problem was not a lack of government intervention but the existence of too much or any government intervention. As the argument goes, the Great Recession would not have occurred if governments would have allowed capitalism to do what it is designed to do. Too little not too much capitalism was the problem. Thomas Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust diagnoses the housing bubble's part in this whole affair from such a position.*

This series continues to be really good. And interesting. Jean Grey written as a person. Jean meeting Rachel. Alex Summers being written as a person. Kitty. But the art is so incredibly awful, it is beyond distracting. And it turns what should have been one of the best of the Marvel Now books into something just plain bad. Call it a 4.5 for the written and a 1.5 for the art.

I'm in love with Kitty Pryde in this series. Only Joss Whedon has sone better with female mutants. It's fun to see Kitty as a mother figure to Jean Grey. Jean's conflicted romance with Scott and then Beast is a fun take on the usual dynamics. Also, Angel's fear with the result of his brain-fried future self has interesting reverberations. Hooray for Immonen's pencils! Though sometimes simple, his covers are dazzling.

This is more like it. Kitty finally takes Jean to task for messing with people's minds, giving her a stern talking-to. There are a lot of neat little personal interactions, which is an area Bendis excels in but hasn't been nailing in these books until now.

Chief among those interactions is the "reunion" between original Cyclops and his younger brother Havok. Teenage Scott and now 30-something Alex get to have a moment that they've never really had before, thanks to the screwiness of time travel. There's also a nice moment between Jean and Old Hank and then Jean and Young Hank, which probably changes more things in the X-Men than any of their other adventures in the future could.

The art by Immonen is spectacular yet again, keeping multiple actions clear in each panel while maintaining the flow of the story. David Lafuente's pencilling in the last issue is more cartoony, but it suits the lighter nature of that decompression story perfectly. As Scott and Bobby go to town to lighten up and Jean and Hank share secrets, it feels like classic X-Men from the Claremont/Byrne era in the 1970s: world-shaking action followed by some downtime with joking and intense teenage feelings.

Yeah, this is the stuff.

This is the type of comics I love to read. Has the serious moments, the laughter, and the character building.
+teenage angst and confusion
++excellent fighting scenes
+++beautiful colors (#14 especially)
+++Havoc and young Cyclops is wonderful
++excellent artistic shots
+Jean grey, love the young Jean Grey.
++Kitty Pryde and Jean scene.
++Cyclops and Wolverine confrontation