X-Men Fairy Tales 2 by C.B. Cebulski and Kyle Baker

This is the second issue of a mini-series, but, near as I can tell, is a stand-alone story, with no reference to previous or forthcoming issues. This story is given a credit on the title page of being "inspired by the African fairy tale, The Friendship of the Tortoise and the Eagle."

Kyle Baker illustrates this issue in his current color style, which appears to be illustrated wholly on a computer. The line art appears to be drawn with a tablet and the colors rendered in the same manner. The main detraction of this recent development of his full color illustrations (from about the time of the Vertigo title I Die At Midnight), is that he uses a color pallette that is much more distracting than engaging. Garish pastels against muddy earth tones with yellow or purple highlights are too often the norm. The characters themselves in this story, though, are skillfully drawn and strike a smooth balance between anthropomorphism and realistic rendering. The faces of the main characters, the eagle and the tortoise, are expressive and emotive, without crossing the line into drawing human faces on animals. The small caveat in the art which allows the two main characters to act as stand-ins for two of Marvel's oldest characters, Magneto and Professor X, is a hint of purple outline on the eagle's face and a purple x on the back of the tortoise. This minimal hint at the identity of the characters in this parable is just the right touch. It allows the book to fit in the X-Men line, but isn't so heavy handed as to overwhelm the simple story.

The story itself may or may not be a close interpretation of the aforementioned fairy tale, I had never heard the story before. It felt like any number of fables from Kipling to Scheherazade, but that has always been the idea — a fable should consists of archetypes. This story does and ably adds a layer by allowing two oft-used animals stand in for two archetypal Marvel characters, the man whose mind is more powerful than his body, and the man whose quest for power deisables him from giving or allowing acceptance. I thought it appropriate to keep the direct references minimal, and to allow the story to speak not only for the Marvel characters, but using the idea of parable, to allow the characters to speak for all of us, which to me had always been the strength of Marvel's characters anyway.