Written by Alex Paknadel

Pencilled by Justin Mason

Colour by Federico Blee

Letter’s by VC’s Travis lanham

Cover by Justin Mason and Federico Blee

 

In the wake of Krakoa’s fall, the X-Men Mansion is a prison and the Sentinels have been re-branded. The monolithic, vast hunters of mutantkind are no more. Lawrence Trask, heir to the Trask fortune and the Sentinel legacy, runs a team of wounded soldiers put back in service to capture and neutralize mutant threat. None of them have questioned the chance to get back in the fight. All of them are about to.

Alex Paknadel crams a lot into this ambitious first issue and none of it feels restricted. We meet the team, and their fantastically named Sentinel transport, Real Boy, and see them out in the field against a well-known mutant threat. We see the consequences of their augments, the consequences of their actions, get a look at Trask’s agenda and at the X-Mansion and most of all get a sense of where the book sits in the world. Paknadel, and Trask, have cleverly found a gap in the market and the Sentinels feel a lot like the human version of the X-Men. Where Cyclops has often described the X-Men as a rescue organization, the Sentinels are a defensive one and the nasty,  ruthless efficiency of their work put me in mind of Ellis-era Stormwatch. These are people doing bad things for what they’ve been told are good reasons. Whether they’ve been told the truth? Well, that’s the show.

Federico Blee and Justin Mason do a spectacular job of setting the tone, the opening, icy Russian fight is big, expansive superheroics of the sort you’d expect from a team dressed a little like a 1990s Image comic book. But at the exact moment you think that, the creatives have got you. The villain this issue (I’m not spoiling this very welcome surprise) calls them out for their colours and name and the moment he does you realize this is a branding exercise. One that an interlude with Trask explaining just how useful his powers could be to his business, is designed for a very specific purpose. Big business waging war on the people it relies on and the soldiers on the frontline slowly realizing how little they matter. In any year this would hit hard. In 2024, it feels positively cathartic.

Verdict: This is witty, dark, smart fun about and by a team who know exactly what they’re doing. The X-Men relaunch has been top notch and this is one of the best books so far. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart