Originally Posted by
Yohei72
This was exactly the thread I needed. I've never followed the X-Men much, but I'm a Hickman fan and was really excited by HoxPox. The flagship X-Men wasn't as exciting, but I knew that was kind of inevitable, so I was going to give it some time. Then I opened up issue 2 and one of the first things I saw was narration text telling me about a massive and vital plot twist over in X-Force. I almost immediately lost interest, since it seemed the line would be so interconnected that I would have to follow other titles by authors who don't interest me, and I had one of those "ugh, comics are so much work" moments I'm sure a lot of us have from time to time. So I dropped it from my pull list, figuring I might check out the TPBs from the library eventually.
But this thread encouraged me to give the flagship a second shot, and to check out X-Force, since it seems to be widely the most popular title, and was ground zero for the aforementioned plot twist. I picked up all the intervening issues of both this week, and really enjoyed them, especially X-Men, whose weird sense of humor is surprising and works really well for me (among other elements). I especially liked #3 - "Hordeculture" are hilarious and I hope they come back quite a bit.
There's no way Hickman can sustain anything like the dazzlement of HoxPox, which was a firehose of jaw-dropping Big Ideas and twists, week after week. But he seems to be settling in to dig in to the deeper storytelling and intellectual possibilities of his new status quo in the way I want and expect from him. The dinner talk in #4 was thrilling (though I'll agree with some other commenters that while Yu draws beautiful images, he doesn't do facial nuance well enough to do justice to all the conversations in this series).
I had also bought #1 of New Mutants, again because of Hickman, but abandoned it after that. I had no idea who most of those characters were, and so their relationships and the story meant little to me, and probably as a consequence, I was kind of bored. I'll probably go the library trade route with that.
So while the X-franchise is not entirely living down its reputation as a daunting thicket of characters and backstory... I'm hanging in there for the moment and enjoying the ride. So, thanks for the help!