Review: ‘X-Men’ #25 Puts Several Types Of Evil-Doers In Their Place

There’s a lot of shades of grey in our world as far as good versus evil. In some cases, it’s pretty black and white. But in others, it’s not as clear, and that’s a big idea that X-Men #25 explores in an unexpected way.

Jed MacKay, Tony Daniel, Mark Morales, Agustin Alessio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, and Clayton Cowles celebrate this volume’s anniversary in a big way.

The X-Men have a new mission. They fumbled and failed to stop Doug Ramsey before he fully evolved into Revelation, forcing him underground. Now they’re chasing leads to find him, starting with the Morlocks. But to find them, they’re going to have to dismantle an organization of Mutant Nazis … Who said they can’t have a little fun along the way?

MacKay does something really interesting here.

First, he takes the mutant metaphor, and creates a fascinating dynamic. Where mutants have commonly stood in for minority groups, the metaphor is easily able to have mutants stand in place of racism or homophobia. Here, MacKay takes Andrea and Andreas Strucker — actual mutant Nazis — and makes them a unique sort of mutant supremacist. Not mutantkind as a whole, like Magneto or Mystique have been at some point or another in their existence, but specifically white mutants.

It’s a very cool, very unexpected twist on the mutant metaphor. It not only uses existing villains in a great new way, but it also stretches the metaphor further, playing with it in a way that echoes the nuance of the hatred and evil we face in the real world today — if there’s a way to look at someone else as “other” people will take it. And you know what? We should shut them down just like any other intolerance.

Meanwhile, we get the more nuanced evil. The director of the Office of National Emergency has been revealed, and he’s an X-Men deep cut I won’t spoil. But after the X-Men spend most of the issue punching Nazis, here’s a shade of grey — a nationalist that puts PR above doing good, while challenging the X-Men in a way they don’t often face, and is much harder to stop than punching.

This issue just exemplifies how MacKay has quietly become one of the most interesting X-Men writers we’ve seen in a long time. Even if he’s not writing high concept stories, he has some incredibly interesting perspectives and twists on what we normally see.

On the art side of the issue, Daniel continues to do a very good job, while Morales enhances his pencils. He gets to go all out the entire issue, and it’s so much fun. Watching Juggernaut in action alone makes the issue worth it. There’s a few small quirks through the issue — some of the panels lose their detail, or Magik suddenly has a new design — but overall, Daniel and Morales do amazing work.

Sifuentes-Sujo continues to do fantastic color work. While he seems to largely be coloring the story in primary colors, it pushes a lot of the banality of evil by using mostly earth tones, blacks and greys until the X-Men themselves burst on the scene. And red always is used to draw attention to something important on the page.

Cowles continues to be an incredible chameleon. His letters add depth to the story, but never distracts.

X-Men #25 is available now from marvel Comics.