X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM #2 - December 1999

All Children Wear the Sign
Credits: Joe Casey (writer), Steve Rude (pencils), Andrew Pepoy (inks), Paul Mounts (colors), Jim Novak (letters)

Summary: Professor X futilely reaches out to Cyclops, who’s secretly living with criminal Jack Winters. Meanwhile, a group of anti-mutant teens is armed by a militia leader. After Beast stops them from harming Iceman at school, he’s targeted by the bullies with a sniper rifle. When Beast knocks one of them off the top of the stadium’s bleachers, the teen dies. Beast becomes an outcast, but still resists Professor X's help. Later, one of the bullies, Starkey, develops mutant powers. Elsewhere, Jack Winters plans the robbery of a nuclear plant.

Continuity Notes:

· The Sentinel from the previous issue is dismissed as a prototype. Fred Duncan tells Xavier that Trask denies the robot was his creation, but he knows Trask is lying. This might be an attempt to ease the series more closely into continuity, but I don’t know why the creators would’ve bothered.

· Jack Winters is the Silver Age villain Jack O’Diamonds. Jack O’Diamonds was a diamond-themed supervillain who played a role in Cyclops’ original origin story; he’s been recast as an average thief for this miniseries.

Review: Joe Casey has said before that Bill Jemas would’ve released Children of the Atom as Ultimate X-Men if the line had existed in 1999. It’s easy to see how this miniseries influenced the line; the slow-motion formation of the team, the constant attempts to show realistic reactions to mutants, and the “grounding” of some of the more fantastic and/or ridiculous characters, such as Jack O’Diamonds. At best, this is a modern reinterpretation that makes decades-old stories more palatable to a modern audience. At worst, it’s a needless apology made by creators embarrassed to be working on this material in the first place. I wouldn’t throw Joe Casey into that crowd, but many of the people brought into Marvel in the subsequent years clearly couldn’t hide their contempt.

I wasn’t as adamantly opposed to the Ultimate line as some fans were, but I quickly realized it served no real purpose, and I think it was obvious within a few years to everyone that Marvel had no idea where to go with it. It’s easy to start over. It’s even easier to “ground” all of the superhero elements, as if you were on a cable TV budget. It’s hard to keep the audience’s attention for more than a few months with this approach, though. I think time has shown the faux-Bryan Singer approach to superhero comics is just another gimmick that should be used sparingly.

And even though I cite Bryan Singer, I have to acknowledge that Casey wrote this at least a year before the first X-Men movie was released. He was clearly on to something; a segment of the audience wanted to see “fresh starts” for the books, and was more than happy to dismiss anything from the past that could be viewed as silly. The success of the first X-Men movie in 2000 unfortunately gave Marvel license to “ground” everything (overlooking one of the major reasons why Singer downplayed many of the fantastic elements of the X-Men was due to budget concerns), and since continuity was something too dorky to be concerned with, it seemed like almost everything Marvel published was a retelling or reimaging of an already published story with some absurd “relevance” tacked on to it. None of those comics had Steve Rude art, though.

Have I gone on a prolonged tangent that has little to do with Children of the Atom? Probably. But there isn’t a lot to say about this issue. The X-Men are moody teens who are too dumb to accept help when they clearly need it, Fred Duncan grows more sympathetic towards mutants, and some bigots do bigoted things. The pace is excessively slow, especially when you consider that everyone knows how the story is going to ultimately end. But, again, Steve Rude’s art makes even the most mundane scenes more tolerable.