Ultimate Comics was one of the best ideas that Marvel as a publisher has ever had. Creating stories with an iconic pantheon and unburdened by canon, the creators of the original series were free to update and reinterpret for an audience that didn’t want to wade through the canon-nightmares of the 90s. But that original Ultimate run came to an end in 2015 as that inter-connected universe started to become its own massive universe to keep up with. Eight years later and the line is returning with new takes on Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Peach Momoko and Travis Lanham’s Ultimate X-Men.

My personal knowledge of the X-Men extends to the 90s cartoon and Capcom arcade games—its interwoven comic universe and cast of dozens had always looked monolithic from the outside. But in this first issue, we’re looking at one person—Hisako Ichiki. She’s graduating from middle school despite not being around for the past few months and receives a note to meet at the temple nearby. When she arrives, she’s confronted by…something. It’s vaguely human-shaped, although the shadow around it makes it hard to see anything substantial besides its eyes, and knows about her friend’s suicide as well as her role in ignoring said friend’s cries for help. The human-shaped thing proves this by offering Hisako a charm her friend had given her—a small omamori of an armored figure.

Ultimate X-Men doesn’t feel like a superhero comic. The human-shaped figure on its own is reminiscent of a horrific shadow in a Junji Ito story while the interpersonal drama between Hisako and the people around her feels completely grounded. Momoko balances the mundane and bizarre well enough to make you forget that you’re reading a re-launch of X-Men. And it’s in this balance and subversion that the story begins to feel fully divorced from its original inspiration to such great effect that I’m finding myself invested in an X-Men comic for the first time in my comic-buying life. Giving a creator like Momoko the space to experiment yields a story that is immediately appealing to readers who found the original comics intimidating. The style, the tone, the singular focus at the moment, it all helps to create this sense of reading something completely new with mutants. Without the original series to draw from, we can see what these kinds of comics could potentially look like.

Ultimate X-Men could have been a lot of things—a reboot, a new introduction for the characters before the movies came out, a refocusing on the original cast—but it went for something completely different. The refocus is what made the original Ultimate Comics so appealing and a jumping-on point for people interested in the characters but not the canon. With this first issue, we’re already seeing a new world and a way for the old to be reinterpreted. It’s these kinds of creative freedoms that can still allow monthly superhero stories to feel fresh and appealing despite the decades dragging behind them. 

Get excited. Get armored.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.