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NYX: No Way Home #1
Posted 24 Aug 2008
Writer: Marjorie Liu
Artist: Kalman Andrasofszky (interior), Alina Urusov (cover)
Letters: VC's Joe Caramagna
Colors: John Rauch
Publisher: Marvel
2.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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In the ’70s, big comics publishers’ standard procedure
with any cult favorite they hadn’t foreseen, from Gerber’s
Howard the Duck to Kirby’s New Gods, was not to
nurture their creators and pursue their fanbase but take the thing
over and ruin it with a house-style straightjacket. That’s not
quite what’s happened to NYX, but it’s strange to
see Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada’s brainchild taken away
and tamed to the degree it has been, presumably with his blessing.
“There’s a feeling that we
know everything to expect from No Way Home when it’s
scarcely started.”
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The original NYX miniseries was a breath of fresh (or foul)
air, ostensibly about homeless teens who happen to be mutants but
primarily about the actual terrors of an adolescent’s
unexplainable world. There was true trauma in the prophetic pop-ups of
lead character Kiden’s murdered policeman dad, and real-life
horrors of privation and prostitution around every dark corner.
Quesada dropped the ball a bit right at the end, concluding the
often-delayed (but always worth-it) series with a meaningless
cliffhanger, but that was just an extra reason to want more.
No Way Home is it, and I’m just about as sorry I
wished for it as I was when I saw Quesada’s name nowhere in the
credits. It’s no travesty, but it’s been toned down into a
kind of situation drama of the kids living in a squalid tenement and
encountering unsurprising supernatural perils. Artist Kalman
Andrasofszky captures the economical, illuminated look of original
artist Josh Middleton well enough, though without Middleton’s
aesthetic subtext of kids moving through a kind of nightmare
animation. Marjorie Liu’s script is respectfully somber and her
internal monologues and character interactions are naturalistic and
believable, but there’s a feeling that the events and cast of
the first series have diagrammed everything she’s going to be
able to do in this one; that we know everything to expect from No
Way Home when it’s scarcely started.
The first NYX was a prestige series that didn’t know
it until it was done; No Way Home returns with all the highbrow
buzz the earlier one earned, and is consequently packed with back-page
DVD-extra-style victory laps – cover sketches, interior pencils,
the creators interviewing each other – before there’s much
to celebrate. And I’m sad to say I don’t think there will
be.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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