X-Men #18 pg 10 (Inside the Vault) - Asrar art, Hickman story

Youngbloods carrying the torch, sweet!

Great art. Nice group shot. I really enjoyed the couple of issues focused around the vault. 

Great page! Congrats!

I'm freakin' out, man.

Asrar's art is a great match for the Hickman slow burn and then an explosive reveal like we see here.  This one has got to stay in your vault as the keepsake or time capsule of this run.

Beautiful Asrar piece

Agreed that was an incredible storyline - my head spins if I think about the implications on the characters involved.  Great example!

Yup, really liking that first panel, followed by the splash.  The character layout, and the stark inks, give a nice eerie "they'e arrived" vibe which is easier said than done to exhibit.  Definitely a prime Asrar piece.  Congrats!

Big fan of Asrar's art.  He killed it with this story, and this is a great page from it. 

This story, HoX/PoX, and Inferno were my favorites of the Hickman era. This is a great page to own from this particular story. Congrats!

Very memorable piece from what's shaping up to be the most memorable era in X-Mrn history. 

Absolutely -excellent- pick up, James, and you're spot on about how fantastic this intense story was.  I need to re-read it to refresh, but my -memory- of the story is that It had all the rich depth (and delicious hard sci-fi) of the best Hickman, but I remember it also having a stark, insulated feeling, as if these issues only contained this one, single storyline (instead of multiple tendrils), and we (as readers) were just as cut off from the other characters (and wider X-world) as Wolverine, Synch, and Darwin were.  Like I said, I need to re-read it, but that's the impression/memory of it that I carry with me.  Super intense and lovely, just like this piece!  Fantastic balance and composition here, sporting some killer, chiaroscuro-laden, intentionally "binary" character designs (honestly, can you ever go wrong with a flaming skull?) and weighty menace.  Super duper cool.  Congrats, James!

You bring up an amazing point,  all exterior storylines were cut off for these two issues.  They are a standalone set and we are cut off from everything else as the theee go inside the vault.  It needed the cutoff for proper time displacement, what ended up being hundreds of years for the three inside, it was only a few weeks or months on the outside.  It had to be a conscious decision and properly done.  Definitely wanted more of these stories.  

Word, bird.  This is the story I think of most often when I think back on the Hickman run.  I didn't even know who Synch and Darwin -were- before this story, and by the end I was desperately attached to them.  Their struggle here is wedged in my memory.  Outstanding writing, and Mahmud's fantastic art was just as superb.  Congrats again on the great examples from this arc!

Yes both issues #18 and #19 from this run were so solid.  I knew the three characters really well, but I also didn't necessarily love Darwin and Synch. With this storyline, I finally really felt for them.  And the love story between Synch and Wolverine (Laura Kinney) was one that will go down in my current top 5 at the moment.  It was "short" in the amount of pages but also considered the longest love story for the X characters for the time it covered.  And it had long lasting effects in stories from the next volume.  I love that these stories already got revisited and call backs in recent issues.  Sad to see the Everett and Laura love story end but wow was it well done and emotionally pactful (especially in her return and the recent FALL OF X story when "it" ends).  But the love story started here and fed so many great connections and stories.  And the Darwin story of no mutant left behind, all started here and created such a wonderful playground for the writers and artists to play in.