Inkspot Fancy

I've loved comics a while, but I'd not been a huge X-Men reader, but this first Exiles ultimate collection was given me by someone who loves the X-Men and wanted to share that love with me.

Well, I can say this - it got me hooked on Exiles. :)

The premise is simple, if weird even for a comic book. Six X-men from various realities have been pulled out of their timelines because something has gone wrong with their world that changes their entire life. They will travel as a group to different worlds, fixing bits of reality that have gone awry. If they succeed, they go back to their life like nothing happened. If they fail, they go back to their new, jacked-up timeline. And if they die, they die. Sometimes this means being heroes, like they usually are. Sometimes it means acting against their nature - killing one person to save the rest. And sometimes, the things they're asked to do are simply horrendous.

The situations are diverse and the characters they chose to use are great and fun. Some of them we get a lot less time with than I'd like, for various reasons, and they provide a great canvas against which to see the differences in each reality. They are encountering people they know from their own timelines but whose worlds are so incredibly different they they're sometimes largely unrecognizable. They don't know who they can trust or what they're going to find, and they definitely end up with strange bedfellows time and time again.

This series is great. Sometimes we get the typical superhero stuff, planning and fights and punching. Sometimes we get character pieces, explorations of history or trauma or just friendships. There's one issue told entirely without dialogue, showing a series of dreams by the characters - in some cases showing their fondest hope, and in others, their deepest fear. We also visit Mojoverse, encounter the son of Franklin Richards and even get to pick sides in a fight between Latveria and Atlantis.

If you like X-men, or just superhero stories, this is worth checking out. It's a really great series, and this is an incredibly solid opening collection.