New X-Men: Academy X - The Complete Collection

New X-Men: Academy X (Collected Editions) #1-3.5

by Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weir, Randy Green (Illustrator)

The Xavier Institute students thought they had it tough when Professor X was running things - but now Cyclops and Emma Frost are in charge! As a new semester begins, the students adopt code names and costumes, and are separated into training squads...and Dani Moonstar's New Mutants soon find themselves feuding with Emma Frost's Hellions. But can the two teams work together to save Wither from himself?

Then, something is haunting the halls of the Institute, and the students must get to the bottom of it! Prodigy tests his powers! A forbidden relationship is revealed! A teacher is mourned! And drama unfolds at the school dance! Can the New Mutants rediscover their shattered friendship? And what trouble will the Hellions get up to on summer vacation?

COLLECTING: NEW X-MEN (2004) 1-15, NEW X-MEN: ACADEMY X YEARBOOK 1, NEW X-MEN: HELLIONS 1-4

Genres: Comics, X Men, Marvel, Graphic Novels

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2005

About the author

Nunzio DeFilippis is married to Christina Weir; together they have written a large number of graphic novels. They have written superhero comics but also created original comics and graphic novels of many genres, from YA fantasy to sports to horror to crime drama.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This series is pretty awful. It's full of high school melodrama and very little superheroics as the authors chronicle the kids' first year at Xavier's. The bright spot was the Hellions miniseries at the end, or "How I Spent My Summer Vacation". The Hellions head to California for vacation and make a deal with the devil. The art throughout is pretty terrible except for Clayton Henry on the Hellions minseries.

[Rob Marney · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection is very uneven. The art ranges from fun to confusing - whenever you have to tell female characters apart by their hair, it's a bad sign. DeFilippis and Weir keep the main "Academy X" series as boring as possible, with a laser focus on high school drama that is supposed to capitalize on the X-Men: Evolution TV show but forgot to include any super villains, high stakes or lasting consequences. The teaching staff show none of their usual personality, talking about school events like they're of dire importance and generally acting like a Responsible Concerned Parent throughout. Even the important bits are repeated almost verbatim every issue they're mentioned, like Jim Shooter is still editor in chief. Dani, aren't you you mad at Rahne? Yes, nothing has changed since issue 8, I will describe it in the same terms.

The bright spot comes from the Hellions miniseries at the end, which is fun, has an interesting concept, and is working with a team of teenagers who are much more interesting and dynamic. It's like reading the Harry Potter series from the point of view of Ravenclaw, then getting 100 pages about Harry and Hermione at the very end. Even the fight scenes are compromised by the authors' determination to stick to the New New Mutants cast: the only "combined use of powers" that ever happens is "use my wind powers to guide your pheromones, smart guy calls orders, speedster in the front, healer in the back". These powers just don't interact in satisfying ways, and when the team is broken up by Kyle and Yost, it frees up the book to have a lot better mix of action and romance.

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

After the destruction of the Xavier Institute at the end of the last New X-Men series, Cyclops and Emma Frost throw open the doors to a new crop of mutants. But not everyone's cut out to be an X-Man, and the trials and tribulations of high school are often bad enough without adding superpowers to the mix.

The series doesn't get off to a good start, because the first arc is pretty bad. The first three issues do absolutely nothing, dragging out a plotline about separating the kids which turns out to be entirely anticlimactic, before a training exercise just causes the characters to bicker even more than usual. The last issue or so involving Wither and the FBI are pretty good though, and gave me hope for the next arcs.

I think what really got me here was just how unlikeable everyone was. Surge is abrasive and rude to literally everyone, Hellion is an enormous douchebag with no redeeming qualities, and Elixir is too busy chasing skirts to be an actual character. Everyone else was various shades of bland, which didn't sell me on any of them.

Thankfully, things pick up a bit from there. The next three issues, Haunted, are a fun little ghost story that actually forces all the characters to work together properly, and the What If? nature of the next two issue story, Too Much Information, is exactly as extreme as you'd expect a Marvel What If? to be, with the added bonus of actually having consequences on the main storyline instead of just being a throwaway.

The rest of the New X-Men issues are one and dones. X-Posed finally puts Rahne and Josh's relationship on blast, leading to her leaving to be a full-time X-Factor member over in Peter David's run, while the Northstar funeral issue ties in to Enemy Of The State. There's a nice two or three page exchange between Anole and Karma that I really liked there. Then there's a semi-two-parter prom/end of the year type story involving the Blob, followed by a coda from the New X-Men Yearbook, which feels oddly rushed. All of the conflicts that the writers have thrown at the characters get talked out and solved in less than 20 pages, seemingly because they were departing the book and wanted to give the new team a blank slate to work with. It's fine to do that, but it does cheapen the last 15 issues by having basically no consequences to anything.

And finally there's a four issue Hellions mini-series, showcasing what the team got up to on their summer vacation. This is easily the best story of the bunch, probably because we get to focus on six characters instead of like fifteen, and it goes a long way towards showing that a) Hellion isn't actually a huge dick, and b) the rest of the Hellions do have a personality after all.

Unfortunately, the artwork is another area where the book suffers - the first four issues were extremely off-putting, although it got a little better from there. None of the artists on display are particularly memorable, even with familiar names like Paco Medina and Clayton Henry slapped onto them. Everything past the first four issues is the same shade of early 2000's okay-ishness.

After a very shaky start, this series manages to right itself in the middle before coming to a rushed halt. Coupled with some dodgy artwork, I'm definitely not as big of a fan of this book as I wanted to be. I love teen superhero books, but even for me this one was a little too high on the pointless drama and a little too low on everything else.

[Tomás Sendarrubias García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Con esta serie me pasa algo muy curioso, y es que no sé si es por algo mío, pero me parece de las mejores que se han escrito nunca, o al menos, de lo mejor que yo he leído nunca. Y con cada relectura (y en este caso, llevo unas cuantas), vuelve a engancharme. Quizá sea el aire a lo Sensación de Vivir que Nunzio DeFilippis y Christina Weir le dieron a la serie, con sus giros amorosos, sus citas, sus personajes aprendiendo lo que es vivir... No lo sé, por lo que sea, pero siempre me ha parecido la leche. New X-Men: Academia X es la heredera se la miniserie Nuevos Mutantes que también tuvo guión del matrimonio DeFilippis-Weir, donde Danielle Moonstar comenzaba a reunir un pequeño grupo de mutantes sin ánimo bélico, es decir, no quería una nueva Patrulla-X, sino que llevaba mutantes a estudiar al Instituto Xavier, en la época en la Morrison había sacado a los mutantes del armario y se multiplicaban exponencialmente por todo el universo Marvel. Sus protagonistas, de hecho, no tendrían siquiera nombre clave hasta los primeros episodios de esta colección, cuando después de que Magneto/Xorn destruyera el Instituto, los nuevos directores, Emma Frost y Cíclope, decidieran que todos los alumnos tenían que estar preparados para defenderse.

Y esa es la historia que cuenta esta serie, previa a los tiempos oscuros de Dinastía de M, y que tuvo entre sus páginas momentos y personajes realmente llamativos, que Weir y DeFilippis supieron manejar con una especial maestría. .........

[Judah Radd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent. Nothing special.

This may be called “New X-Men,” but it has precious little to do with Morrison’s New X-Men.

While Morrison was able to tell a story about the principle X-Men cast as well as introducing us to some young mutants and showing us their struggles, Nunzio DeFilippes mostly just focuses on teen drama. Which, but the way, isn’t all bad. Sometimes I like teen drama! It’s just kind of a bummer that this never gets serious.

I could tell that Nunzio wanted to avoid any major ramifications. He played it pretty safe, weaving around Wolverine: Enemy of the State without disrupting anything (although everyone mourning Northstar was a welcome dose of grimness.)

The art was meh. It wasn’t bad. It just told the story. There were zero awesome panels that made me stop and admire.

All in all, this is essentially a sequel to Nunzio’s The New Mutants run, and it probably should have been called that instead of New X-Men. The characters are charming and it’s an amusing and sometimes fun read... but I wouldn’t let the word “X-Men” fool you. This is not an X-Men by book.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a long time fan of the X-men series. And I know that most people have said that this one deals with a lot of teenage drama and such. But seeing as the main characters are actually teenagers then it makes sense. Yes there are X-men in here but they’re teaching new kids on how to use their powers and yes there’s going to be drama. It’s still staying with the times of today kids. I am glad that they did an amazing job with this series.

[Daniel Huerta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember reading this in middle school and being so enthralled and invested in this story. Giving this a second go was … different. It’s very clear why I resonated with this as a 12 year old. The storylines are very Disney channel vibes and everything is always resolved in 8 seconds. As an adult, I want something more to chew on. If there’s a fight scene, somebody gotta die. Like there needs to be something to resonate.

Oh well. It was fun going back and reading this with nostalgia.

[Rickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Heroes

I really liked this series. I loved all the characters and their different powers and team dynamics. I also loved the inside view of how the Xavier school works! Normal classes mixed with powers classes and the different team events. I do wish they would have done more with the other teams instead of it being all New Mutants and Hellions.

[James Zanghi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting pre-House of M/M-Day collection of stories involving the potential next generation of X-Men. As usual, like with most X-Men comics involving them, it's hard to see Emma Frost or Scott Summers as good people after reading Avengers vs. X-Men.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really dropped the ball from the New Mutants stories that this continues.

If you took away the boy/girl drama, you'd have almost nothing left. And the drama just isn't that interesting. Everyone eventually ends up where the authors foreshadow they'll end up.

[darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*

[Joshua Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such fun, getting to know tons of new and recent characters done right

[Emilie]

I'm thinking about the rating. This collected many issues and at least three big arcs. I should have read it an arc at a time, and not read the whole thing all at once in the digital format.

This was set back before what I've been reading recently, and was in some ways more light-hearted. There were a lot of students at the school, but the focus was generally kept on eight or so, with occasional moments that showed how other students were feeling. And there were characterization moments with the younger teachers, like Dani Moonstar.

I was glad to get some background on characters like Prodigy, Wither and Anole. Northstar is killed off here, though I'm pretty sure he comes back. Anole is especially sad, because Northstar was a mentor that he could talk to and who would understand him. Perhaps it's from hindsight, but this seems to hint pretty broadly that baby gay Anole, so green figuratively as well as literally, could talk about being a gay teen with the openly gay Northstar, who had come out some years ago. I'm not sure how Northstar comes back to life later on, but I know he does. But that's some time in the future. Maybe along the line Anole will discover that he can discuss his sexual orientation with the lesbian Karma, X'ian Coy Mahn, who takes over as the mentor for the "Alpha Squad" of students.

Prodigy has apparently been a student for some time, though he's reintroduced to readers here. This is long before any iteration of the Young Avengers, so it was nice for me to catch up on some of Prodigy's earlier development. Though he's very smart and logical, he also works hard to try to support other students that he feels need some support and help. He tries to be fair, and can be when his emotions aren't particularly involved.

Wither has a tragic backstory, but isn't particularly allowed to go full-on Goth gloom. He makes friends, even. It was nice to see that he doesn't stay totally isolated. Though he and his friends make some decisions that are dubious at best, usually at least some of them, including Wither, have good intentions.

The artwork was stylized, and it was different for me to see Prodigy with a very broad face instead of the thinner face that I've seen in later portrayals of him. I will say that I was glad that with this artwork, at least the teenagers didn't look as pre-adolescent as they do in some later books.

Recommended for those who like comic books along these lines, with mutant student tropes.

Edited to add: This would have made much more sense if I'd read New Mutants: Back To School - The Complete Collection first, as this follows directly after that.

[Alexina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t care what anyone says I love this run so freaking much and fell in love with the characters. It was at its best after m day and when the team changed.