232 pgs. full color | $39.99 hardcover
Today is truly an uncanny day to be an X-Men fan. After 45 years, artist John Byrne, one of the primary architects of The Uncanny X-Men, returns to craft new stories of the Marvel superhero team that he helped launch into the sales stratosphere back in the late 1970s with his new graphic novel X-Men: Elsewhen. Inspired by fanfiction, Byrne got the bug to illustrate new X-Men comics back in 2019. Picking up from where he left the book back in 1981, Byrne seems completely invigorated to tell new stories of where he imagined the comic would have gone had he continued illustrating the title back in the ‘80s. He began illustrating pages for his own amusement and originally released a free page a day on his website, none of which were officially in collaboration with Marvel Comics. Now Abrams Books has collected his complete output and officially released X-Men: Elsewhen Volume 1 as a stunning, deluxe format graphic novel through their Marvel Arts line. The results just might be the most fun you will have reading X-Men comics all year.
To set the stage for Elsewhen, let’s do a brief X-history lesson. The X-Men were originally created in 1963 by the engineers of comics’ Silver Age, writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. With an interesting premise—a team of superheroes that derived their superpowers not from miraculous accidents, but from genetic mutations leading to the next step in human evolution—these “Children of the Atom” seemed destined to be the next stars of Marvel’s ’60s hit machine. Alas, the original X-Men was received only as a second-tier comic book, and lackluster sales resulted in cancellation by 1970 and the series’ entrance into reprint purgatory.
Marvel unexpectedly decided to relaunch the faltering title with Giant-Size X-Men #1 with an all-new international cast: Storm from Africa, Colossus from Russia, Nightcrawler from Germany, and fan-favorite Wolverine from Canada. The publisher then relaunched the ongoing series with Uncanny X-Men #94, in which now-legendary X-writer Chris Claremont first joined the book and began to craft the ongoing superhero soap opera that would make Marvel’s merry mutants household names. Artist Dave Cockrum illustrated the first 13 issues of the relaunched title. The series finally began attracting a wider audience when John Byrne joined as the primary illustrator/co-plotter on issue 108 in 1977. Claremont and Byrne would go on to create some of the most iconic comic stories in the history of the medium.
With John Byrne’s action-packed illustrations, the series ran wild with endless imagination and dynamic drama. Soon Claremont and Byrne created classic X-tales like the psychedelic nightmare “Proteus,” the dystopian, time-hopping crisis “Days of Future Past” (adapted into a good movie), and their absolute power corrupts absolutely pièce de résistance “The Dark Phoenix Saga” (adapted twice into bad movies, but had a relatively faithful adaptation in the ‘90s animated series), all of which set a template for years of similar X adventures and cemented the book’s legacy in the pop culture zeitgeist. Byrne’s contributions to Uncanny X-Men nearly a half century ago are still cited by most fans as the essential stories of Marvel’s mutants.
It is no wonder then that Byrne decided to use X-Men: Elsewhen to explore what could have been had he never quit working on the massively popular title. From the first few pages, you can tell Byrne is having an absolute blast returning to the adventures of the lionized team. His linework oozes creativity. The reader can vicariously feel Byrne’s excitement in the pages, as the artist’s enthusiasm shines through with the vigor of an illustrator half his age getting their very first chance to tell stories of the beloved X-roster. Unencumbered by any editorial other than himself, Byrne allows his imagination to run wild again, and readers are completely rewarded for it. We soon find the X-Men travelling to familiar locales, like the hidden prehistoric tropical oasis in Antarctica known as the Savage Land, where Wolverine slashes his adamantium claws into the vampiric pterodactyl-man known as Sauron. In just a few more pages, you might find the team traveling to Asteroid M, where their archnemesis Magneto orbits earth and solemnly watches over the planet like a god judging inferior Homo sapiens. Later you’ll flash to the happenings in the furthest reaches of the galaxy, where in the Shi’ar Empire the fiery Phoenix force grows so out of control that it consumes an entire solar system. Byrne’s fast-paced approach feels refreshing in an era where comic stories commonly linger on a plot point for dozens of issues, often with little payoff.
The crux of Byrne’s Elsewhen revolves around two central plots. First, in this alternate timeline Jean Grey, one of the original members of the X-men, has survived embodying the Phoenix force (instead of meeting her character’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” fate). However, Jean’s mental capacity has been reduced to that of a five-year-old child, and Professor Charles Xavier is desperately seeking a way to return her faculties. The second major focus finds a new batch of upgraded robotic Sentinels hunting not only the X-Men, but also the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, as well as regular human civilians. The Sentinel’s A.I. programming was not originally designed to target anyone other than mutants, so how these deadly robots have been manipulated becomes the focus of the X-Men’s investigation along with their efforts to stop the Sentinels from wreaking havoc on the general populace.
The Sentinels always work as one of the greatest X-antagonists because they help emphasize the mutant metaphor, a heartless political force hunting, terrorizing, and vilifying a minority population (think ICE in Minneapolis earlier this year). More so, an army of robots gives something for our heroes to fully rip into on the page, and it’s always fun to see Wolverine’s claws do some real damage. Byrne has been at this long enough to know which characters work best for energetic illustrations.
As a veteran artist, it is fair to say that Byrne’s illustrations are not quite as strong as his previous work in X-Men back in the early ‘80s. Nonetheless, his overall compositions and innate ability to draft sequential art are still at a master’s level. There are a few of Byrne’s story points that can also be slightly jarring in Elsewhen. For example, there is a panel in which Kitty Pryde explains to a prospective student at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters that “It’s all a bit Harry Potter, but long before there was a Harry Potter.” Does this story exist directly after the events it picks up from in the comic books from the ‘80s, or does this story exist in a world years later post-Harry Potter? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. The fictional X-Men exist out of time, and if Byrne wants to acknowledge the team’s wide net of cultural influence, more power to him.
Byrne’s story does lack some of writer Chris Claremont’s considerable contribution back in their original collaboration. In revisiting the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” Byrne does not venture to reexamine Claremont’s psychosexual subtext that titillated readers in the beginning of the Reagan administration. Any criticism of Elsewhen though is easily brushed aside by the sheer amount of fun it is to read. Perhaps no one had a better time with Elsewhen than Byrne himself, who explains in his introduction, “I’ve had more fun with this than just about anything else I have worked on in fifty-plus years in the biz.” And with two more volumes of Elsewhen on order from Abrams Books, any critique could still be addressed in the subsequent editions.
The biggest reservation for some modern comic readers will be whether they need to have read countless prior X-Men issues to understand X-Men: Elsewhen. The answer confidently is no. You can pick up Elsewhen with no prior knowledge of X-Men and still enjoy it. Years before comic reprints, trade paperback collections, comic archive apps, Wikipedia recaps and completionist streaming services, your average comic reader would pick up the latest issue off a rack in a convenience store and start the story right in the middle of the action. There were often editor’s notes in the comic telling you about prior issue’s story points, encouraging a treasure hunt to collect the prior issues with the rest of the intriguing storyline. Or think of it this way: When you meet someone new in life you don’t stop and ask them to tell you their entire life history before you can proceed with your conversation in the current moment. Embrace that mentality and pick up Elsewhen. Now dive headfirst into the newest X-Men adventures written and illustrated by one of their most significant creators. | Jon Osia Scorfina
You can find X-Men Elsewhen at your local comic shop or at the Abrams Books website. Click here for a preview of the book, courtesy of 13th Dimension.
