Grace actually handles Bobby Drake’s sincere but fraught attempts to connect with his parents throughout these five issues quite well. How are they going to accept the fact that he’s homo sexual as well? a super-powered mutant, despite the fact that he’s been a superhero since he was a teenager. Drake have yet to really accept the fact that he’s homo superior-i.e. What makes it particularly challenging is that Mr. Through a series of connected short, issue-long stories, Grace shows the X-Men’s good-humored, fun-loving Bobby Drake trying to come to grips with being a newly out gay man and struggling with breaking that fact to his parents. The writing, by versatile comics writer, artist and writer/artist Sina Grace, is on much surer footing. (The image above, by the way, is from Kevin Wada, who draws many of the covers, not Vitti or one of the interior artists.) There’s a pretty notable example near the climax, where Iceman uses his freezing-stuff power in what sounds like a pretty unique way to single-handedly defeat the unstoppable X-Men villain Juggernaut, but the art is just a picture of the two in a vague pose. It doesn’t help that the art, in addition to its lack of cohesion, doesn’t always tell a readable story.

The resultant story thus lacks a consistent look or style, and never even has a chance to establish itself visually, let alone differentiate itself from all the other X-Men books, let alone Marvel superhero books or superhero books in general. There are five artists credited for working on the five issues collected within, and primary artist Alessandro Vitti only draws every other issue, with fill-in artists cobbling together the alternating issues. One need not get farther than the table of contents to see a warning sign.

Iceman, Vol. 1 by Sina Grace