Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: peach momoko, ultimate x-men

A Very Different Ultimate X-Men #1 From Peach Momoko (Spoilers)

This Ultimate X-Men is a whole new world, from Peach Momoko and Zack Davisson. And is uncompromisingly closer to their work in Demon Days.

Of all the new Ultimate line of books, Ultimate X-Men is the greatest departure from what has been. Ultimate Spider-Man reframes the superhero story as one of a mid-life crisis rather than adolescent angst and Ultimate Black Panther as a political story of isolationist and colonial motivations. But they both fit within the expectations of the American superhero model. The original Ultimate X-Men was born in the light of Mark Millar's shock-jock work in comic books but generally sat alongside the other X-Men titles. This Ultimate X-Men is a whole new world, from Peach Momoko and Zack Davisson. And is uncompromisingly closer to their work in Demon Days, rewriting American Marvel Comics legends into storytelling traditions of East Asia. An in Ultimate X-Men #1, even as it acknowledges the rest of the Ultimate Universe…

…the story it tells is a different one. Of adolescence, grief, suicide and moving on, even as you are haunted by the past. And how, in order to get there, you may need to build yourself armour. But at what cost?

So we have something more supernatural than superheroic, as the ghosts from the past impinge in very physical ways in the present.

How charms may predict the future, celebrate the present, and protect from the past…

And in so doing gives us a very different story for the X-Man known as Armor. Created by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday for Astonishing X-Men in 2004,  Hisako Ichiki was a Japanese mutant with the power to create and generate an enormously solid and impenetrable dark red-colored psionic exoskeleton body armor. She enrolled at the Xavier Institute as a teenager with her best friend Wing. After he was injected with a so-called cure for being a mutant, he committed suicide. She would later join the X-Men.

In Ultimate X-Men #1, we meet a young Hisako Ichiki at school, somewhere she hasn't been since the events of years ago.

As her best friend then, Tsubasa, subject of schoolyard bullying, apparently takes his own life. This is not the only suicide scene in the comic, and it's the kind of thing that some may want a trigger warning for.

But also returning. With the same charm he once gave her. And also one that resembles the original Marvel X-Men armor look.

The original creation of Armor a couple of decades ago, was very much intended to reflect certain Japanese images and aspects. This Ultimate X-Men #1 is far more successful, leaning on both Japanese subject matters and storytelling approached, even needing a glossary to explain some of the less familiar cultural details, but doing so in order to serve the purpose of a traditional superhero origin, and one as steeped in tragedy and loss as any other. Just that in America they prefer murder to suicide as a motivational force.

In this Ultimate X-Men, there is also the suggestion that her Armor is something with its own agency, its own motivation, protective of her but with a mind of its own.

And not one mention of the word "mutant"…

ULTIMATE X-MEN #1
MARVEL COMICS
JAN240496
(W) Peach Momoko (A/CA) Peach Momoko
Visionary creator PEACH MOMOKO (DEMON DAYS, STAR WARS) creates a new generation of X-Men for an all-new universe! Hisako Ichiki is a teenage girl who just wants to live a normal life – go to school, hang out with her friends, ignore the political strife broiling over after the events of ULTIMATE INVASION – but life has other plans for her. In Japan, urban legends have sprung to life and brought some unusual new powers with them…Meet Armor, Maystorm and a group of new Ultimate X-Men the likes of which you've never seen before! Rated T+In Shops: Mar 06, 2024 SRP: $5.99

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