YMMV / X-Men: Grand Design

• And You Thought It Would Fail: The thought of distilling the poster children for Continuity Snarl into six double-sized issues seems Beyond the Impossible. As of Second Genesis Piskor has taken everything from the origins of the first class in The Silver Age of Comic Books to the events of "Lifedeath" in 1984. He ultimately stuck the landing heading into the '90s with X-Tinction.
• Awesome Art: Ed Piskor's art is styled in a Retraux fashion that brilliantly captures the look and feel of comics from the silver and bronze age while giving each character their own personality.
• Angst? What Angst?: It is during the first battle between the X-Men and Shi'ar Imperial Guard that the M'Kraan Crystal is destroyed, leading to the cessation of all reality. Thanks to her cosmic abilities the Phoenix is able to save the X-Men, Lilandra and the Starjammers and urges them to help her will the universe back into existence. Despite the narration stating that they feel every second of the seven billion years it takes to accomplish such a feat, the X-Men return home with a simple, shaken “we're… back” from Colossus and the team is back to playing baseball the next day while the Phoenix sleeps off rewriting reality basically on her own.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • This is Ed Piskor's attempt to distill the convoluted nature of X-Men comics into a single, concise narrative. Due to the obvious care taken in researching each and every character it's clear that the stories themselves are treated with respect while taking into the account the tolls that three decades of continuity and editorial influence can have on a narrative.
  • The series could easily follow Marvel's party line and disregard and erase Madelyne Pryor's role in X-Men history just like Marvel has been doing since 1989. Piskor acknowledges the reality that this hasn't worked and the character was part of the history.
• Character Rerailment: Charles Xavier was always depicted as a strict but caring mentor who nevertheless committed several duplicitous acts such as crushing on a teenage Jean Grey, faking his death without telling any of his students, designing disturbingly specific means of murdering all of his students, covering up the deaths of his second team of X-Men sent to save the first from Krakoa (X-Men: Deadly Genesis), forcing the sentience behind the Danger Room into slavery so his team could have a workout space and all manner of general queasiness involving his tendency to brainwash first, ask questions later. While this series doesn't omit all of Xavier's negative qualities, keeping aspects like his questionably ethical relationship with Gabrielle Haller intact, it does redefine him as a compassionate leader dedicated to achieving peace between mutants and humans who is willing to treat his students as adults worthy of honesty.
• Contested Sequel: Fantastic Four: Grand Design by Tom Scioli is… not as well regarded as the X-Men version. While it still contains an insane amount of Continuity Porn and Awesome Art, it reads more like a history book about the Fantastic Four as opposed to a retelling of their history and the art is often so cramped on pages with up to 25 panels that it's easy to miss how great it looks.
• Funny Moments:
  • The Sentinel mentioned in Hidden in Plain Sight on the main page. Even better is that this hasn't been altered from the original comics at all.
    • In addition, there's a panel of a Sentinel peering through a window behind Lorna Dane while she's on an elliptical trainer, as if it's gawking at her ass.
  • Wolverine attempts to use his typical Badass Boast in response to Jean (really the Phoenix Force) asking why he didn't leave any Hellfire Pawns alive for them to question. He gets halfway through his "I'm the best there is at what I do," spiel before the Phoenix throws him out of a window. Also serves as a bit of Nightmare Fuel as Scott realizes that Jean has begun to lose a bit of her grip on sanity by tossing a teammate out of a window so casually.
  • Issue #1 of Second Genesis ends at the funeral of Jean Grey, with Scott quitting the team and everyone wondering what's next for the X-Men. That is, everyone except for Kitty, who has showed up for her first day at the school and been left on the stoop with everyone forgetting about her. Being a thirteen-year-old girl, she has a perfectly pouty response:
    “I'll just walk through this stupid door…”
  • Kitty and Kurt need to distract the Shi'ar. Using the clothing creator she had found earlier, Kitty makes herself look like the Dark Phoenix and has Kurt teleport her around the ship, scaring the feathers off of the Shi'ar soldiers. After they've finished Kitty gets a bit of teleportation sickness and nearly vomits.
• Gateway Series: Looking to get into the X-Men, but terrified by the Archive Panic of hundreds upon hundreds of issues and wanting something more substantial than a Wiki page? This here's your series.
• Moment of Awesome: Xavier's Battle in the Center of the Mind with the Shadow King. On the outside it appears to be two unassuming men having a staring contest with the unusual Psychic Nosebleed, but on the inside it shows to telepathic titans tearing at each other with gigantic monster forms, black holes and explosive attacks. At the end Xavier is shaken, but standing while Farouk has slumped over dead on his balcony.
• Narm Charm: A lot of the cheesier concepts of the Silver Age have been retained, especially the costumes, but the strong continuity, vivid imagery, jettisoning of Comic-Book Time and way that it's all played with a straight face makes the more outdated moments of the '60s and '70s work without detracting from the overall story.
  • The aforementioned Sentinel sneaking up on the X-Men by hiding behind the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center is goofy for how much it reminds one of Scooby-Doo, but the previous beatings the X-Men have received at the hands of the Sentinels, the team's fear at Jean, Logan and Banshee being kidnapped and the fact that it leads to the death of Jean Grey and rebirth of the Phoenix keeps it from being too ridiculous.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The image of Xavier's Psychic Nosebleed as he battles it out with Farouk shows just how close he is to having his mind torn apart by the psychic parasite.
  • In a moment of weakness, Scott asks Madelyne if she's a reincarnation of the Phoenix. Madelyne slaps him, knocking Scott's glasses off and forcing him to scramble to find them. Though she gets offended by the question it's shown just as Scott takes his eyes off Madelyne that she briefly takes the form of the Dark Phoenix, showing that the cosmic entity isn't quite gone forever.
• Spiritual Successor: To Marvels, which examined the Silver Age of Marvel Comics through a modern lens in an attempt to create a more unified sense of past continuity. Though the X-Men played a brief (though symbolically significant) role in Marvels, they are the focus here, much like the The Avengers and Fantastic Four were in that series.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Scott's reaction to Jean's death. Even though the audience knows that it's actually the Phoenix that died (for however possible such a thing is for such an entity) he doesn't, and it's shown over the course of Second Genesis #2 that he's been completely broken by it. Even when he meets Madelyne Pryor, Jean's perfect double and gets married the narration outright says that he's spiraling and hanging on to some semblance of a happy life to keep himself from breaking on the inside.
  • That same issue sees Storm get accidentally blasted by Forge's power-draining gun, completely losing her ability to affect the weather. It had been shown several times already how much she loved flying and the image of a Storm post-important haircut laying broken and depressed in Forge's bed is utterly heartbreaking. And this is the final image of ''Second Genesis'', leaving us hanging until ''X-Tinction''.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While the streamlining of the X-Men continuity into a much, much more managable storyline is always going to leave some parts out, the cut-off point of the early 90's means that storylines that happen after that point are ommited, meaning that we don't get to see stories like Age of Apocalypse or House of M adapted into Ed Piskor's amazing art.
  • Relatedly, though also understandably, due to the entire series being released prior to the start of House of X and Powers of X, any and all developments from that era of X-Men comics aren't covered.