Jamie Madrox just came back from the dead, and he’s already managed to screw over the entire future. The main Jamie died in the Death Of X miniseries, but this is a character whose entire schtick is creating multiples of himself, so of course one of his duplicates survived. That duplicate has a half-life, though, and in order to keep itself from perishing, it traveled into the future. This set off a chain of events that forced Madrox to come back to the present to save the future, tailed by a bunch of other Madroxes that want to bring him back to the future. Multiple Man leans into the craziness of superhero comics, with writer Matthew Rosenberg devising a tangled time travel plot that takes advantage of Madrox’s powers to make him a one-man super-team.
This exclusive preview of next week’s Multiple Man #2 has the X-Men dealing with a group that includes Madrox as Hulk, Doctor Strange, Cable, and a Deadpool with laser Wolverine claws. Andy MacDonald and Tamra Bonvillain’s art matches the shifting tone of Rosenberg’s script, which begins with wacky superhero comedy before shifting to dystopian drama. MacDonald’s character work brings out the humor in the script, and when Beast starts to get into the implications of time travel, Strange-Madrox makes a loud fart sound to jump past the boring stuff and get to the action. That eagerness to avoid the logistics and just tell a fun superhero story gives this book a playful spirit, but there’s also a darkness lurking underneath the silliness, a darkness within Jamie Madrox that threatens the future of the entire planet.