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.