Multiple Man #1 Makes Time-Traveling Mutants Fun Again

WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Multiple Man #1, by Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald, on sale now.

Time travel and X-Men go together like peanut butter and Nutella. It’s a delicious combination, but it’s certainly not for everyone (some people have nut allergies, folks).

Over the last few decades of X-books, time travel has not just been used as a simple plot device, it’s been wielded like a magic eraser to fix continuity problems and missteps from the issues of yore. But with every attempt to glue what little strands of logic X-Men comics still hold back together again, the fallacies of playing with time chip away at any sense of continuity.

But, honestly... there’s nothing wrong with that.

X-Men comics are bonkers, plain and simple. And while you could say the same for pretty much every superhero comic under the sun, Marvel's X-Men lean into a certain kind of crazy that is both endearing and oddly off-putting to potentially new readers. It can be difficult to recommend a good “entry point” for X-Men. The mythos is so dense and convoluted that even if one was to ease into something like Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men or the extremely palatable Joss Whedon and John Cassaday run on Astonishing X-Men, there would be a lot you would just have to roll with, sans context.

Decades of love and betrayal, death and rebirth, time travel and paradoxes weigh heavy on the franchise, and starting at the beginning is way too daunting of a task to ask of a new reader to undertake. But the one thing that is persistent throughout is time-travel. It’s something anyone who is familiar with X-Men books knows is an aspect of the franchise, something that is omnipresent, for good and ill. Thankfully, it seems that Multiple Man #1 is trying something new, and how it will all pay out is anybody’s guess, which makes it genuinely exciting.

Time travel stories have produced some of the greatest X-Men moments ever. Arcs like “Days of Future Past” and “Messiah Complex” are pinnacles of what the ever-evolving team of mutants are capable of from a narrative standpoint. They lean into the intrinsic weirdness of zipping through time and embrace the myriad potential outcomes (somethings simultaneously) of their actions. But there are X-stories where utilizing time travel does more damage than good or, at the very least, paints creators into a corner when it comes to story progression.

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When Brian Michael Bendis brought the original five X-Men from the past to present day, it seemed like a novel idea, one that wouldn’t necessarily have long-lasting implications. But the team quickly became a fixture of the franchise. They made a lot of the dynamics between them and present day X-Men pretty strenuous (and spawned the aggressively sub-par “Battle of the Atom” crossover; what a snoozer).

This isn’t to say everything the team was involved with was sub-par. Quite the contrary, actually. Huge chunks of X-Men: Blue (which stars the OG5 team) are fantastic, but a lot of the time-traveling story beats not only don’t carry a lot of heft, they aren’t silly enough to allow readers to put their brain in "sleep mode" and just enjoy their insanity.

Multiple Man, however, may have found a balance between this disparate set of tones.

The last time we saw Jamie Madrox he was... well, dead. This immediately opens the door to some goofy business as it does with any character coming back from the grave. When Multiple Man, a character who is ripe for comedic moments, finds out that the duplicate body he has preserved is decomposing quickly, it pushes him to do something ridiculous: Travel back in time and collect past versions of the same duplicate. At least, that’s what the plan appears to be.

Madrox is not a character who is worried about time paradoxes or butterfly effects or ripples in the space-time continuum. He’s looking out for himself, and greedy self-preservation when justified to an audience is comic gold. Multiple Man might be a jerk, but if you put yourself in his shoes, wouldn't you do the same? You can stop nodding now…

This take on time travel is a smart move. We have a character who might be able to solve a huge problem through gaming the time stream, but if the final page of Multiple Man #1 is any indication, his actions may also have some dire repercussions. It’s this sort of fun give and take X-Men books has been missing. Time travel being handled with a similar tone as the one in the Back to the Future films is arguably the best way to play with it. Not everything has to be battle-hardened cyborgs from a dystopian future or young naive versions of disgraced heroes brought to the present. Sometimes, things can just be weird, and that’s okay.

KEEP READING: Marvel Finally Resolves The Original X-Men’s Time Paradox