Try as I might, I’ve had a very difficult time connecting with Marvel’s current lineup of X-Men comics. At first, that sense of disconnect could be chalked up to the sting of losing the Krakoa status quo back in 2024. The Age of Krakoa was easily the most creatively fruitful period in the X-Men franchise since the heyday of Chris Claremont’s run, and Marvel made a grave error in opting to wipe the slate clean rather than finding a way to move forward with the resilient mutant nation as the permanent baseline. But that apathy to the post-Krakoa X-Men line hasn’t faded over the past two years. The X-Men franchise is stuck in a creative rut, and any hope that the DNX crossover will shake things loose is sadly dashed in the first issue.
DNX is ostensibly an X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover event, though its roots lie mainly in writer Jed MacKay’s ongoing X-Men series and last year’s Age of Revelation crossover. The premise behind the series is that both Cyclops and White Beast (the original, corrupted version of Hank McCoy who now leads the supervillain cabal known as 3K) have seen the future where a devastating virus has transformed humanity into mutants. Cyclops seeks to prevent that future from coming to pass, while White Beast wants to own that future. And now the simmering conflict between the X-Men and 3K comes to a head.
Frankly, I wish this issue were as efficient in laying out the scope of the conflict. But instead, the script gets very bogged down by exposition right from the get-go. There’s too much emphasis on Cyclops explaining the stakes and summarizing recent X-events and not nearly enough on diving into the actual conflict. The result is that the story barely feels like it’s gotten started by the time issue #1 reaches its end. With Marvel already in the midst of multiple other crossover events at the moment (Avengers: Armageddon and Queen in Black), DNX really needed to make a stronger case for itself starting out.
It doesn’t help that the FF characters feel so superfluous here. They enter the story via a subplot involving regular Beast turning to Mister Fantastic to cure Magneto of his ongoing genetic malady. Even with that storytelling vector, it never feels like the Fantastic Four have a logical or organic reason for being a part of this conflict. This reads more like a regular arc of MacKay’s X-Men run with an outside super-team shoehorned in. 2012’s Age of Ultron showed there is potential in exploring the unlikely partnership between mutants and the Richards family (in the case, the Wolverine/Invisible Woman alliance), so hopefully DNX will eventually find some interesting veins to mine there.
DNX #1 only really works when it focuses on the 3K characters. Any team that forces characters like Cassandra Nova and Magneto’s clone Joseph to work to work together is bound to be a flimsy arrangement at best, and McKay makes the most of that here. You almost have to feel sorry for White Beast as he sees his back-stabbing, deceitful allies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and tries to hold the entire enterprise together through sheer force of will.
Artist Federico Vicentini and colorist David Curiel do their best to spice up what is a very dialogue-heavy first issue. Vicetini’s figure work is inconsistent at best, particularly when it comes to character faces, but he does bring a palpable energy to the page that helps offset the plodding script. Maybe that comes at the expense of a few too many Dutch angle panels, but so be it. And Curiel’s colors give everything a vivid look and feel, with some of the standout pages including a visual flashback to the Fatal Attractions crossover and the psyhcic battle between Quentin Quire and Cassandra Nova.
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