If Wolverine: First Class left me wondering about the target audience, X-Men: First Class #11 leaves me utterly baffled. 

Beneath the rather generic cover, this is an issue of metafictional weirdness.  Meet the Continuiteens, three comic store clerks who have learned about the future by accidentally ordering real Marvel comics from a Diamond warehouse in the Nexus of All Realities.  No, seriously, that's the premise.

This isn't really an X-Men story, although it does make the obvious jokes about X-Men: First Class not fitting with continuity in the first place.  It's really an issue of Jeff Parker exploring his odd conceit and blurring the line where the characters start to become aware that they're fictional, and the pseudo-Silver Age world of the strip starts to become polluted by characters who won't be invented for thirty years.  It's even got art from Nick Dragotta, an artist who usually turns up on things like X-Statix.

Actually, it's not so much a story as a joke about the flimsy nature of Marvel continuity.  Continuity glitches just get sorted out in the end, as the universe inevitably tends back to whatever makes the most sense and inconsistencies are simply forgotten. 

A running gag about the Continui-Teens reading the issue we're reading - slightly botched by giving it a different cover - ends with the revelation that you don't need to read the ending because "It never ends!  It's all cyclical!  Don't you see?  Everything eventually comes back!  Exactly what happens doesn't matter!"  Of course, we all know this, but it's still a very strange thing to bring up in the middle of a story.

In fact, it rather sums up the book's ambivalent attitude towards the Continui-Teens, and by extension, the hardcore superhero fans they represent.  On the one hand, it finds their obsessiveness rather endearing.  After all, as a writer, don't you want your readers to throw themselves into the story as deeply as possible? On the other hand, it's a reality check about how little any of this really matters.  Yes, it says, X-Men: First Class doesn't actually make any sense as part of sixties continuity - but does it make any difference?  As the story says, the details always sort themselves out in the end.

This is a very weird and extremely geeky issue, and I'm not altogether convinced it works.  Frankly, I'm not entirely clear what point Parker was trying to make with the Continui-Teens - the story ends by trying to put them over as saving the day with their "extremely thorough" approach to continuity, which doesn't really fit with what came before. But points for trying something a little different, even if X-Men: First Class is the last place I would have expected to see a story like this.

Rating: B

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