Book Review: Marvel: Xavier Institute – First Team by Robbie MacNiven

Format: ebook
Release Date: March 2nd, 2021
Age: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Goodreads

Rating: 3/5 Stars

I would have enjoyed this a lot more if it hadn’t dragged on so much. A lot of the action got to be a bit repetitive, or the characters repeated the same kind of thing over and over. I’m not a regular reader of the X-Men comics, preferring to pick up the occasional graphic novel now and then, so my main introduction to these characters have been some of the Marvel books. So far, I’ve read School of X and The Harrowing of Doom, and First Team falls right between the two in terms of how much I enjoyed them.

Victor (Anole), Cipher and Graymalkin are interesting characters and it was great to see their relationship developing. Like most X-Men stories, there’s definitely a found family feel to this. Anole’s parents are kidnapped by the Purifiers, anti-mutant extremists, and Victor sets out to rescue them, without the permission of Cyclops, but with moral support from his friends.

Victor does what he can, but ultimately realises what all X-Men must: there isn’t much they can do without a team.

I liked the characters well enough, but the conversations between them became repetitive and it felt like a lot of the book was spent waiting around. The action scenes when they came were good but, again, did eventually feel repetitive. It could have benefited from being tighter, a bit shorter, as it often gave the sense of characters going around in circles, especially when it came to emotions and how they felt about certain situations.

The good parts were really good, but overall I noticed the same sort of issues I saw in the previous Marvel book I read – a storyline that doesn’t justify the full length, and a generally bloated book that feels like it runs out of steam.