If Ed Piskor’s name wasn’t recognizable before, it will be now. After gaining recognition for the illustration work he did on American Splendor with writer Harvey Pekar, and Piskor’s own four-volume comic book history of Hip Hop Family Tree, the comics artist convinced Marvel to let him apply the same packed, gossipy, modern-eye view that we saw in Hip Hop Family Tree to the X-Men’s decades of comic book history.
X-Men: Grand Design provides a thumbnail history of the entire X-Men mythology, boiled down to a six-issue arc. And it’s good! X-Men: Grand Design is practically the best Marvel comic running right now due to its humorous, digestible style. Marvel just collected the first two issues of the series into a “treasury-sized” (think Mercury-sized) softcover trade as they prepare to publish the next two issues of X-Men: Grand Design – Second Genesis this summer.
MERCURY: When I was reading Grand Design I was struck by the increasingly bizarre events the young and occasionally murderous X-Men face. It gets borderline slapstick near the end. Cyclops is carrying Professor X—who’s only wearing tighty whities—over his shoulder in one panel. I don’t know how to ask this tactfully. Were you losing your mind?
ED PISKOR: [laughs] At the end of Grand Design, I was working with comics from what I would call a bleak period for the X-Men in every way, shape, and form. The main guy who wrote all that stuff is probably my least favorite writer in comics history, so my philosophy was just to fully lean in and just have fun with it. I guess I’m asking the reader to get through my truncated version so that we can appreciate how great the next part is.
And Second Genesis comes in hard with the good stuff?
