The all-new, old X-Men.
Before I begin, I need to give a general spoiler alert. If you haven't read All New X-Men #1, or even the Avengers vs. X-Men run, there will be so many spoilers in this post that The Doctor or Riversong's heads would spin.
Over the last few decades, we've seen the original five X-Men endure punishments that would break any normal person, be they human or mutant. Cyclops loses about one X-Man per year (our years), Jean Grey has died so much she should have gotten a buy-one-get-one-free deal, Beast has mutated from human-like to an ape form, to a cat form, and now into something else. Angel has had his wings ripped off of him and became the Angel of Death for Apocalypse, and Iceman has been shattered, evaporated, killed, comatose, possessed by Emma Frost, and more. These people never had it easy, and they don't seem immune to what they've been through.
In Cyclops' case, he fell in love with a woman who became life incarnate and then tried to destroy the universe more than once, and just kept dying. He then had an affair with Emma Frost, and through a number of deaths, rebirths, and universe-changing events, turned into what he becomes in this issue, and what AvX sealed for his fate: A full blown mutant terrorist.
Mutants are now appearing everywhere thanks to the Phoenix force (Avengers vs. X-Men, issue #12), and Cyclops is out to recruit them, no matter the cost. Beast is dying, and sees no hope of trying to convince Scott of his insanity. So he decides to go back in time, and take the teenage X-Men back with him, to try to convince Cyclops to stop being a combination of Che Guavara and Fidel Castro.
I would consider Brian Michael Bendis to be one of the best writers in comic books today. I've followed his work for a while, and enjoy the fact that he can put a human spin on the most fantastic of plots.
However the first I heard of this run was the headline of "Jean Grey is returning" which made me want to flip tables and burn things. However I calmed down and read the article, which stated that not only was time travel involved, but that Jean would not be the Jean we know now, but the teenage version of Jean who is only telekinetic. This got my attention.
I was excited to see a time travel story done right. Science fiction has trouble with time travel because the understanding of temporal physics is usually about 20 years behind mainstream science. We're still concerned with altering the present by affecting the past, but Quantum Physics states that it wouldn't happen that way. This is why Beast can go back in time and get the X-Men without altering his present.
The best part of this is that he doesn't care. He's that desperate. I cannot wait to see how the teenage X-Men react to the now ripped and torn X-Universe they're thrown into. This is a series you should keep your eye on.
The first issue is already out, and the next issue comes out on Wednesday, November 28th.
