Welcome to Graymatter Lane, a place where mutants anywhere in the world can come together to teach one another the skills needed for their survival. With instructors including Wolverine, Beast, Prodigy and Magneto, and a campus unlike any before seen, it’s the crossroads of the X-universe as a student body from across the globe works to take mutantkind to the next step in their evolution — and to cope with a brewing threat to all of their number. X-Men United #1 is written by Eve Ewing, drawn by Tiago Palma, colored by Brian Reber and lettered by Joe Sabino.
Canon resets can frustrate the heck out of long-term readers for superhero comics. We want to see our heroes grow and change.
They frustrate us more the more we liked the changes the canon resets undo: I still miss Krakoa (as do the X-Men who lived there). Honestly, I’m still upset about M-Day, and that reset took place in 2005. And yet good canon resets can work, both commercially and artistically. They bring back nostalgic readers who miss the characters they saw on TV, or picked up from drugstores as tweens. They can also make good palate cleansers after a badly done linewide crossover. And they’re a good idea, if status-quo ante really served the present-day characters better than the most recent status quo.
X-Men United (no relation to the X-movie) is a good canon reset. In fact, it’s the second good X-Men canon reset by Eve Ewing, the Ironheart scribe and education scholar who gave us (with Carmen Carnero) the only X-run I could recommend with enthusiasm from 2025 (now helpfully collected in paperback. Unlike her first one, it’s not focused on one character. Sometimes it feels dutiful, or rushed, or disorganized. Worse yet, it takes place wholly outside of Chicago, whose real-life quirks and neighborhoods have given life to almost everything she wrote for Marvel before now. On the other hand, it looks like a load-bearing title for the next line of X-comics, whose center is — once again — a mutant school. There’s no one now at Marvel whom I’d rather have run the whole show.
Better yet, she’s put the new school in a telepathically accessible, interdimensional space, like the recent Avengers Academy. Mutants, including young ones, can get to the school on “Graymatter Lane” from anywhere, a metaphor for the kind of nonlocal, virtual community, on Discord and elsewhere, that today’s young mutants marginalized readers need. Stuck in Kansas, whose government doesn’t want you to leave your house? You can’t get to Westchester. Nor to San Francisco, not easily. You can, though, get online.
“Where can mutants be safe?” Nightcrawler asks the new headmistress, Kitty Pryde (of course it’s Kitty), on page one. No wonder the school is “technically not anywhere,” as Kitty says.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We enter the school, with Kitty and Kurt, in a kind of formal introductory tour (“lecture hall, cafeteria, library, subzero training environment”) that leads into a lecture from the White Queen. It’s Emma (of course) and not Kitty who had the idea for the school, and who runs it, de facto, fulfilling her usual educational mission, “to ensure the thriving of our progeny,” “equipping them with the tools they need to thrive.” That’s how college presidents, and the heads of private schools, speak when they need to impress both teachers and donors (ask me how I know).
Emma’s good at it; Kitty’s heard it all before (she’s a teacher who’d rather meet students than donors). Tiago Palma’s art keeps everything fluid, with facial expressions and body language that lend forward motion even to the necessary scenes of People Just Talking — check out the glee on Kitty’s face once she knows she’s avoided most of the speech. The new faculty includes old hands, like Magneto, and youth just out of high school themselves, like Axo, bright green, perpetually worried and striving (it doesn’t work) to show confidence from his brand-new teacher’s chair. The school projects optimism, but also (as Kitty declares) “responsibility.” Powerful mutants who’ve made it to adulthood ought to look out for the rising generation (especially when we’re illegal in Kansas).
Those adults must also train the next generation in self-defense. Palma draws, well enough, an extended fight scene in the new Danger Room, led by both Wolverines, with (of course) a mutant who thinks they’re too old for a school, and another who shows she knows how to kick ass quite young. This time the latter’s Arakkii, from the war-filled island once ruled by Apocalypse: “I had more combat experience in the cradle,” she snarls, “than you will know in your lifetime.” The Danger Room scene also folds in Wolf Cub, a teen wolf (shades of Rahne Sinclair) who can’t control their instinctive violence (shades of Feral, Wild Child and early stories about Wolverine).
The rest of the gang from Exceptional (Melee, Bronze, Rift) teach here, too. Moreover, the school boasts a familiar-looking, wires-chair-headset update on Cerebro, the machine that finds mutants anywhere. That gang’s first adventure then involves finding, and bringing to the school, and welcoming, a bewildered 13-year-old French mutant who loves her stuffed kitty (named Moose), gets in trouble at regular school and endangers her folks with her powers. Palma draws kids well, too: This one comes with massive, black-and-white natural hair, and a big purple tail, and we see her smile, and freak out, and then accept comfort from mutant adults.
Ewing and Palma are playing the hits, to the hilt. Mostly it’s nothing X-fans haven’t seen before, but after the “Age of Revelation” and the chaos of 2025, it’s a relief. The double-sized issue gives Ewing room enough for character moments, and room to introduce small changes that already mean a lot. The neo-Cerebro, which only Axo can operate, isn’t exactly an X-gene detector, nor a telepathic amplifier for every mutant on Earth. Instead, it hooks Axo up to “young mutants who are feeling debilitating levels of unrest, depression, or isolation.” He finds the mutants the school needs to find. And then Rift’s portals send the school’s exfiltration team (or “welcome wagon”) to them. Like a Discord invitation, but better.
Also more dangerous. Every garden, in stories, comes with its own serpent, trusted at first, a menace at last. Graymatter Lane comes with a beautiful literal garden, whose bromeliads and giant blueberries remind me, at least, of Krakoa. The school also comes with its own maybe-betrayer. Surprisingly (to me), it’s Cyclops, who’s so burned out, embittered and wary — because his last four group projects burned down — that he denounces the school at its first meeting. Back in Alaska, grimacing amid his own gritty technology, he tells a surprised Glob Herman that Emma and Kitty “don’t understand how dangerous this situation is.” By “situation,” he means bringing mutants together, connecting the young ones to the old. Palma draws Glob superbly, too, making him sticky and goofy, sympathetic and gross, like a zombie designed by Sanrio and wrapped up in bubblegum.
Being Scott, he no sooner sees a problem than he wants to do something about it. But would Scott really attempt to blow up the whole school? If so, will he cop to it? How will his ex-friends react? If not, whodunit? Of course Ewing and Palma (who’s fine with explosions) are playing the hits here, too: IIRC every previous Xavier/Jean Grey/Frost school/institute/academy also blew up. But none of them blew up so soon.
After-school specials
- Logan and Laura get costume resets, too: Logan’s in brown and dull gold, first seen in Uncanny X-Men #139, IIRC the last X-costume John Byrne ever designed. Laura wears the very Logan-like outfit familiar from All-New Wolverine, but now she behaves like an adult, a teacher. Good for her.
- Kitty gets an all-new clone of Lockheed, “one of my oldest and most beloved friends.” Bronze loves the new dragon. Bronze names her (yes, her) Marigold. Awwwww.
- Axo smiles. Once. At Sophie Cuckoo, who asks — adorably — “can I brood with you?” Teen romance next issue? Or soon?
Buy X-Men United #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
