X-Men #18
Wolverine, Darwin, and Synch’s time in the Vault is revealed in X-Men #18 by writer Jonathan Hickman, artist Mahmud Asrar, colorist Sunny Gho, and letterer Clayton Cowles. For a while, X-Men has felt sort of aimless and been one of the weaker X books, but this issue shows just how great this book can be.
Wolverine, Darwin, and Synch enter the Vault, trying to gauge what the threat level of the Children of the Vault is. In the Dome, the center of the Vault, the Blackbrain telepath’s memory is downloaded, and the Vault’s AI decides that the Children need to be brought to level three to deal with the mutant threat when it detects contamination in the Vault. It sends its post-human assets after the X-Men and what follows is a swift, bloody fight that finds the X-Men taking down their foes before one of them self-destructs.
X-Men has had a problem for a while now. Part of it was X Of Swords- the long crossover killed the momentum of the entire X line but had the biggest effect on X-Men. Pausing everything that was being built to focus on Apocalypse and his wife and kids was good for the crossover but bad for the book in general. Before that, the book got embroiled in Empyre for a few issues, and while those issues were good, they once again took it away from what it was supposed to be a book about the X-Men and their new life. While other Dawn Of X books like X-Force, Marauders, and Wolverine told great stories that illustrated what life on Krakoa was like, X-Men just sort of meandered, almost like Hickman was stretching things out. It was good, but not much was happening.
In fact, the last really great issue of X-Men was the one that began the story that this book continues. The Children of the Vault are the kind of thing that readers got a glimpse of in Powers Of X- the post-human threat to mutants, artificial evolution using machines, and temporal manipulation. This is the promise of Hickman’s X-Men that readers have been clamoring for- the sci-fi stuff mixed with superheroism. That is what this issue gives readers- the threat of post-humanity to mutants and the battle against it. This issue is peak Hickman and is pretty much the best issue of X-Men he’s written in a long time.
Asrar’s art is great, and there’s no other way to describe it. From the vista of the City in the Vault, to the design of the post-humans to the action scenes, Asrar really delivers in this issue. Everything in this issue looks great, from the opening page with the broken Master Mold to the massive explosion that ends it.
X-Men #18 finally fulfills the promise that Hickman made in House Of X/Powers Of X. X-Men has been coasting for too long, and this issue finally changes that. By continuing the story of Wolverine, Darwin, and Synch in the Vault, Hickman is showing readers just how dangerous the post-human threat to mutantkind is. This issue is a breath of fresh air, and it feels like this is the type of X-Men book readers were promised when Hickman came aboard. Asrar’s art is the perfect complement to the whole thing. It reads great and looks amazing, and is everything one could want in an X-Men comic.