X-Men Days of Future Past – Comic Book Review

Not too long ago, trailers were released for X-Men Days of Future Past – the Movie. I may not be a huge X-Men fan (movies or comics), but the movie’s title picks up on one of the X-Men comics more famous stories, available as a collected volume paperback. Good enough to have a look!

Days of Future Past is a nice little X-Men story arc, if you enjoy going retro with early 1980s comics. Unfortunately, the collected volume comes with lots of filler (as the actual Days of Future Past story is short).

Relive the legendary first journey into the dystopian future of 2013 – where Sentinels stalk the Earth, and the X-Men are humanity’s only hope… until they die! Also featuring the return of Alpha Flight, who help combat the Wendigo, the history of the X-Men from Cyclops himself…and a demon for Christmas?!

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#1 – Back to the 1980s

The collected volume X-Men Days of Future Past collects the Uncanny X-Men #138-143 from the year 1980. Only issues #141 & #142 truly make up the Days of Future Past story. The other issues are different and unrelated X-Men stories.

Overall, I felt the comic shows its age (for better or worse). There are few of the larger panels or spreads of the kind one finds in contemporary comic books. There’s also much more text, a lot of it being exposition and fairly repetitive.

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#2 – Filler Comics

My main gripe with the book is that it is a lot of filler. Days of Future Past doesn’t start until about page 107. Up to that point, there’re other stories:

1. An X-Men chronology with – at best – encyclopedic value, but not very interesting to read.
2. An X-Men trip to a hellscape based on Dante’s Inferno, which felt like somebody trying much to hard to show off his literary sophistication.
3. A side-adventure with a cast of (highly politically-correct) Canadian Super-Heroes.

Last but not least, there’s also a Christmas-Special, following Days of Future Past, about Kitty Pryde being chased by a monster. A “coming-of-age” story, which I rather enjoyed, not least because Kitty Pryde clearly is the main-hero of Days of Future Past (and, looking at her wiki-entry, a very new addition to the cast back in 1980).

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#3 – Days of Future Past

Days of Future Past is still easily the best story in the book. It’s a variation of the “Humanity-turns-Nazi-style-Genocide-vs-Mutants”-theme, which is a core theme the X-Men comics (and movies) keep coming back to time and again.

Here, the dystopian future of 2013 (!) is a totalitarian nightmare of oppression and anti-mutant breeding. Most X-Men are dead. To change this hopeless future, X-Men Kitty Pryde telepathy-time-travels into her younger self of 1980s (the “present day” the comics were written in) to prevent the assassination of a U.S. Senator by evil Mutants, which will kick-off the totalitarian oppression defining the dystopian 2013.

It’s a complex story – as time-travel stories tend to be – with parallel events both in the “past” of 1980 and the “future” of 2013. It is well told, however, and comes with a little moral message about fear leading to totalitarian impulses, which could’ve easily been written in more recent years.

That said, I don’t see how this story – beyond the title itself – will have any relation to the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past movie. Not only the time-traveler changed – from Kitty Pryde to Wolverine – but the movie seem to tell a story about going back to the past of the 1970s, not about changing a dystopian future (which, given the comic’s age, happens to be 2013 in the book).

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#4 – For Dedicated Fans Only

All in all, I am gonna say this is a book (i.e. the collected volume) for dedicated fans only.

Days of Future Past holds up well enough to the time, but it makes up very little of the overall book; 2 out of 6 issues to be exact.

Moreover, I doubt the upcoming movie will have anything to do with the comic, other than the fact that there’s a time-travel of an X-Men into his younger self (Kitty Pryde in the comic, Wolverine, it seems, in the movie).

As a comic book itself, the text-heavy 1980s style and the convoluted, often cheesy stories don’t make for the most enjoyable read. The Days of Future Past story-arc is clearly one of the better ones from the time, so it is easy to see why it’s fondly remembered.

Z.