If you’re like me, you grew up watching the X-Men Animated Series that aired on FOX at various times, usually Saturday mornings.
For us longterm X-fans, having that show on the air and honouring Marvel’s Merry Mutants was a real treat. See, we’d barely had any animated X-Men; there was their appearance on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on NBC in the early 1980s, and then there was the failed pilot, Pryde of the X-Men, that I only saw because my friend David Tong had bought it on VHS at the end of the decade.
The X-Men of 1992 carries with it a lot of fnd memories, and its been revisited the last few years in various comic books, most notable in the Secret Wars X-Men ’92 series. The trend continued this past week with X-Men ’92: House of XCII.
Here’s the blurb:
THE ’90s ARE BACK — AGAIN! Everyone’s favorite ’90s incarnations of the X-Men have returned…but this time, everything is even all-newer and all-more different! Mutantkind is taking a huge leap forward by founding their own nation on the island of Krakoa, guided by Professor X, Magneto, and a mysterious long-lived woman who knows more than she should. That’s right – the ’90s X-Men are tackling the Krakoan Age thirty years early… and it’s NOT going to go the way you expect!
I absolutely loved this book. Written by Steve Foxe and illustrated by Salva Espin, X-Men ’92: House of XCII is just a strong and solid melding of the familiar ’90s X-Men tv art and storytelling with the current Krakoan world. Credit has to go to the creative team for finding a way into a mature storyline and making it accessible without sacrificing what makes the 616 X-universe what it is today. What’s especially appealing is that, between the characters that are the focus and the story Foxe and Espin are telling, X-Men ’92: House of XCII is different enough from the current status quoe that it doesn’t feel like a retread. In fact, it manages to feel like something all-new and all-different.
The 616 X-Men world is certainly complex, with multiple titles playing out on the politics and intrigue of Kroakoa; if you’re not interested in delving into all the books and complexities, then X-Men ’92: House of XCII is absolutely the book for you.
