The following contains spoilers for The X-Men #4, on sale next week.
In many ways, the X-Men have historically been based on very real ills in the world. Even before Chris Claremont made the comparison to the civil rights movement (and the whole “Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King” aspect of said movement) a central aspect of the series, there's no doubt that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee WERE basing the X-Men on general ideas of prejudice in society (while it wasn't explicitly present in the early issues, it was made quite apparent when the Sentinels were introduced into the series, the idea that someone might hunt you just because you're a mutant. It wasn't explicitly a connection to civil rights, but it was definitely a statement about society and its treatment of outsiders, whether that be people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ people, etc.). Well, in modern The X-Men series, Jed MacKay is taking this approach, too, in a clever introduction of a new take on the Upstarts in The X-Men #4.
The X-Men #4 comes from writer Jed MacKay, guest artist Netho Diaz, guest inker Sean Parsons, regular colorist Marte Gracia, and letterer Clayton Cowles, and finds the X-Men facing off against Trevor Fitzroy and the Upstarts, who are pioneering a brand-new, social-media-centric approach to villainy.
How does Trevor Fitzroy intend to turn the “unhappy” of the Internet into a support system?
The gist of the matter is that the Upstarts are now hunting mutants live, essentially making live-action snuff films for their audiences, and the X-Men, of course, are all out to stop them. However, the X-Men are a little shorthanded in this issue, as Psylocke and Kid Omega are busy, and so is Cyclops, so the X-Men have to go on missions with a skeleton crew, forcing Beast to take an active role in the mission.
Beast, in case you didn't know, is actually a version of Beast from the past, around before X-Factor was created, and so he's both in his traditional blue and furry form, but he's also free of all the evil baggage that his other self eventually got into. Of course, he knows what “he” did, so that weighs heavily on him, which is likely why he took a more behind-the-scenes approach to helping the X-Men with their missions, but now he's forced to get directly involved. It's some clever character work from MacKay, as is the idea of splitting up the team to find new character interactions.
Netho Diaz's fill-in work is EXCELLENT. When you have someone as good as Ryan Stegman as your lead artist, the fact that X-Men and Uncanny X-Men are set to run 18 issues a year (or so) means you obviously can't use Stegman for 18 issues a year, so the fill-in artists are an intrinsic part of the setup (look at how many classic 70s series were in bimonthly comics, and often 17 pages long, or in the case of some 60s series, you had guys like Jim Steranko drawing 10 pages a month on the Nick Fury and SHIELD features in Strange tales), and it’s remarkable how Diaz and Sean Parsons proved to be very good in this issue. It helps, of course, that the brilliant Marte Gracia is still the colorist, and he has a way of making things seem to line up. Still, it’s important to give Diaz all his well-deserved credit for proving to be VERY good in this issue.
The story is very action-packed, just like the first issues of the series, and Diaz handles the action splendidly. The current upstarts are a dark villain team of Peter Milligan and Mike Allred X-Statix comic (O-Force). One of the things I really loved about this current X-Men reboot is how in touch it has with Marvel continuity, and not in a boring, slavish way, but in a “Hey, why not use that awesome concept?” or “Hey, if we need some loser supervillains, why not use some loser supervillains we already have lying around?” way.)
And really, at the end of the day, the Upstarts aren’t really about winning, as Fitzroy stops the stream as soon as the fight starts to turn towards the X-Men. No, it’s just using the truly DARK side of the internet. People on social media who just love to hate, hate, hate, and make the Upstarts THEIR people. As Fitzroy notes in the issue, the X-Men are already hated and feared, so why not create something BASED on hate that can touch that hate, FEED IT, and make them LOVE the Upstarts, as we see the “Deplorables” of the world start adopting Upstart pins and such. It’s so twisted, and yet such an insightful take on the evils of social media.
What are the mysterious revelations of this number?
When the issue starts, we see that Illyana Rasputin is playing chess with someone on the phone. At the end of the issue, we see that it's her older brother, Colossus, who seems to be in some kind of mysterious prison. One of the interesting things about the “From the Ashes” relaunch is that there was a bit of downtime between the end of The Fall of X and the start of “From the Ashes,” so there's room for all sorts of interesting things like “What's the deal with Colossus?”
Meanwhile, the Upstarts are secretly revealed to be being supported by The Sugar Man. This is another great callback from MacKay to X-Men continuity, but it makes perfect sense with the main plot of the series, which is that some mysterious villains are now turning people on as mutants long AFTER their adolescence. This has led the world to believe that being a mutant is “contagious,” which, well, as you can imagine, is SCARYING PEOPLE. However, an evil geneticist like Sugar Man is obviously interested in this for other reasons, which is why he’s sending the Upstarts to publicly kill these mutants, but is bringing them to Sugar Man for testing. The X-Men save the newly established mutant who was trying to be killed tonight, which also expands the cast of the series. It’s an interesting approach that’s making this a must-read in the mutant world.
Source: Marvel