The main X-book of the week has to be Marc Guggenheim and Yanick Paquette's Young X-Men #1, the launch of yet another new title.

Young X-Men is the latest attempt to make the junior team successful.  After New Mutants was a little too sedate, and New X-Men was too much of a bloodbath, it seems we're going back to the drawing board yet again.  Marvel seem to be approaching this part of the franchise like an old television set - if they keep thumping it enough, maybe it'll start working.

The title certainly doesn't do it any favours.  It's presumably intended to set up some kind of parallel to Young Avengers, which was doing rather well until it vanished from the shelves.  Of course, the books have nothing in common beyond the age of their protagonists.  It's awkwardly reminiscent of the embarrassing overuse of New.  For that matter, even First Class seems to be heading the same way, now that they've applied it to a title where the pun doesn't make any sense.  Quite what Marvel think they're achieving by giving similar titles to unrelated comics, I have no idea; the practical effect is simply to make it look as though they've run out of ideas.

Anyway, what Marc Guggenheim gives us in the first issue is a "gathering the team" story, in which Cyclops goes around visiting everyone.  This is a bit odd to start with, as we never actually saw the old team break up.  So the first thing we hear about the ex-pupils returning to their regular lives is... when Cyclops shows up to bring them back to the Mansion.  It comes across as an unnecessary detour.

Strangely, Guggenheim has chosen to dump most of the existing cast members in favour of a couple of new characters, and some characters who've been standing around on the fringes of crowd scenes for years.  This is another odd choice, because the problem with New X-Men wasn't the characters.  It was the unremittingly miserable stories that they appeared in. 

Still, only Rockslide and Dust survive from the previous cast.  The rest of the group is filled out by Blindfold from Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run; Wolf Cub, whom you might remember having the occasional line of dialogue three years ago; and two new mutants.  Yes, new mutants.  Now, I could have sworn there was this big M-Day storyline that was supposed to stop writers from introducing random new mutants as if they were standing around on every street corner, but apparently not, because nobody seems to regard is as particularly noteworthy here.

Now, to be fair, it's pretty obvious reading between the lines that there's supposed to be more to this than meets the eye.  Cyclops' stated reasons for recruiting this group don't make a great deal of sense, and he even seems to be pitching it to the kids as though they're the only X-Men team - not quite what he's telling people in the other titles.  The closing page makes it quite obvious that there's something we're not being told.

And the tone of this book is much more to my liking than New X-Men, which was far too miserable.  Yes, there's a death in flash-forward in the opening pages, but it's played as a very big deal rather than just another corpse.  Yanick Paquette's art probably helps; his work is cheerful enough to take the edge off a couple of moments that could otherwise easily come across as excessive.

But the whole thing just feels a bit off.  I'll grant that the team concept is clearly supposed to be slightly questionable, so that gets a pass for now.  Still, the established characters all seem a bit off-model.  Cyclops is acting strangely all round these days, but Guggenheim is only paying lipservice to Blindfold's garbled speech, even allowing the narrator to spell out exactly what she's thinking.  Dust has implausibly gone from a mutely deferential streotype to an ass-kicking Afghan heroine who mutilates Taliban soldiers.  Now, god knows she needed to grow a spine, but not overnight.  And Wolf Cub, who I recall being Generic Schoolboy #46, has suddenly decided he needs to hunt down and kill Maximus Lobo, because of a story from Chuck Austen's run on Uncanny X-Men which isn't even properly explained to new readers.

The biggest problem, however, is that the issue doesn't persuade me that these are more interesting characters than, say, Surge, Hellion or Mercury.  For all the flaws of New X-Men, it had some very good characters, and jettisoning them in favour of the X-tras  is a bemusing decision.

I'll give it some time to see where Guggenheim is heading with this, because there's evidently a lot of misdirection going on in this opening story.  But first impressions are underwhelming.

Rating: B-

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