Panel of the Week: 7/1/15

Happy Day After 4th of July to everybody out there. Or, y'know, Happy Sunday. Whatever. As long as it's not Monday, right? Anyway, time for this week's installment of what I think was the best panel I saw in all the comics I read from this past Wednesday. Or as I like to call it, something almost none of you out there care about. Which is a shame, because this week's panel is actually meaningful.

Enlarge it for the full effect.

The above panel (which was a full page) comes from Years of Future Past #2, from Marvel Comics. It's part of the alternate reality Secret Wars event, which is how an aged Colossus can be talking to his and Kitty Pryde's daughter while Wolverine's son listens in the background. It was drawn by Mike Norton, who did a stellar job on the facial expressions. Marguerite Bennett is the issue's writer, and she's the reason this panel wins. She hearkens back to what X-Men, at its core, is all about; what it should be about and what it has wandered from for a long time: the fear mutants face is a metaphor for what anyone different faces in the real world. It's one of the things that has always drawn me to X-Men, and to see it revisited is a beautiful change from what has been going on in the X-Men books for the last decade or so. Plus, putting all that aside, just read the message in the words. It's a message worth listening to.