The X-Axis – 1 July 2012
The stop-start world of Marvel scheduling gives us a nice quiet week this time. Three X-Men titles, and two of those are part of the big event…
Wolverine and the X-Men #12 – This is one of those books that you can feel struggling to assert its identity in the face of a crossover. The plot is basically written in the margins of Avengers vs X-Men – the X-Men are hunting down the Avengers and this book is doing it from the perspective of Rachel Grey.
Jason Aaron clearly understands that if you’re going to do a Phoenix crossover in a book where the main cast includes Rachel Grey, at some point you’re going to have to address the fact that she’s a former host. That’s presumably why we’re getting a whole issue about her. Unfortunately, the moment you acknowledge Rachel as a former host, you blast the plot of the wider crossover to smithereens, since it begs the question of why everyone outside the X-Men is ignoring the fact that the Phoenix has been here before and caused no real trouble at all.
That might be why Aaron instead ends up doing a story about Rachel finding herself falling back into her old Hound role as she helps to hunt down the Avengers – a perfectly valid Rachel Grey story but one that largely ignores the plot problems that she poses. I’ll come back to this in relation to X-Men Legacy, but essentially there’s a problem with the X-Men getting too enthusiastically on board with Cyclops’ anti-Avenger crusade. This story handles it better, I think, because even though Rachel’s portrayed as a true believer throughout, it’s still a story that stresses her discomfort with being cast back as a hunter, in any context.
More subtly, there’s a nice scene where Rachel discusses her reservations with Cyclops, and belatedly throws in the question of whether the Phoenix ever mentions her. Cyclops’ response – “The Phoenix loves you, Rachel, just as it loves us all” – is hardly likely to be what she was hoping to hear, but the story cuts away before we see her reaction. That’s a nice way of trying to turn the situation to the story’s advantage; Rachel ought to matter to this story, she feels she ought to matter, and the fact that she’s stuck on the margins of the plot is made a feature in itself. It’s a good moment, in a scene which is well played by Chris Bachalo.
But the focus remains resolutely elsewhere, and there’s a whole “we’ve got to prepare these kids for the apocalyptic future” angle which begs the question of why Rachel chose Wolverine’s side in the schism. Still, there are some nice ideas here about Rachel’s character and a noble effort to make the best of a troublesome plot hole that the main Avengers vs X-Men series emphatically doesn’t want to think about.
The book has other issues, though. It’s never entirely clear why Kid Gladiator is out hunting for Avengers with the rest of the team in the first place, other than that the story needs to give him something to do to lay the way for Gladiator himself to arrive at the end. The Beast is shown here as a loyal Avenger, flatly contradicting a scene in Avengers vs X-Men itself. That’s not Aaron’s fault, but it’s dreadful editing. Keeping track of who’s on which side shouldn’t be that much of a challenge, especially given that only a handful of characters have any choice to make.
And I’m really uncomfortable that both this title and X-Men Legacy have pretty much cast aside the whole “schism” set-up between issues without really addressing anything that goes with that. This ought to be a major plot development for the series, but it’s being entirely glossed over in a way that’s either poorly co-ordinated (everyone thinks somebody else is covering it) or just plain lazy. You can’t set up a central conflict like the schism and just throw it away this casually; with a committee of writers behind this whole event, you’d think somebody would have spotted something as basic as that, but evidently not. Perhaps that’s because it works in the context of the crossover, but it’s hopeless in the context of the X-Men titles, since it kneecaps their central storyline and treats it as utterly disposable. Call me old fashioned, but I like my stories to end rather than randomly stop.
X-Men #31 – Meanwhile, outside the crossover entirely, Brian Wood and David Lopez are apparently still telling stories set when anyone gave a toss about the schism. How quaint.
This series has quite a few things going for it. Since it features just the one team of X-Men, it avoids the sprawl that’s plagued the other X-Men titles in recent years. The art is absolutely beautiful; Lopez is given a lot of expository conversation to illustrate in this issue (I make it that there’s eight pages that really boil down to characters explaining the plot to one another) but his characters are so graceful that the pages are still worth admiring. And it’s a series that gives Storm a proper role that takes advantage of the years of work that were put into making her a leader figure in the first place.
As for the story, though, I’m not quite sold. The basic idea here is that baddies have discovered “samples of ancient mutant DNA” – from the sound of it, mutant neanderthals or some such thing – and have been using it to make genetically engineered weapons. That’s a decent starting point. But the story then wants us to accept that Storm wants to keep this quiet, not just from the general public (fair enough, more people might try weaponising it), but also from the rest of the X-Men, because… uh, because it’s going to divide them further… somehow. I don’t get really get what’s supposed to be the problem here, and the story certainly doesn’t sell me on it. And of course it doesn’t help that Wood’s trying to build his story around the schism at the same time that the other X-Men titles have decided to ignore it completely without any explanation.
Plus, it really does look as though nobody told Brian Wood that Colossus is supposed to be the Juggernaut right now. Considering that the book has a relatively small core cast, the failure to mention in any way a major storyline that’s altering the personality of one of those characters is frankly inexplicable.
Still, beautiful art, and if you can ignore the bit about keeping the other X-Men in the dark, the story works pretty well on its own terms.
X-Men: Legacy #269 – This is an Avengers vs X-Men crossover, and it seems to be starting a Rogue/Ms Marvel arc. In theory that’s a good idea, given their shared history. But I’m not so sure that this is the way to play it.
The plot in a nutshell: Rogue is helping the X-Men to remake the world, because, you know, Schism’s apparently over because the crossover says it is. She’s on her own in New Orleans when Ms Marvel lures her into an ambush, and even though it’s pretty obvious that Ms Marvel wants to talk, Rogue fights back and defeats her. Then Magik shows up to take Ms Marvel off to the holding prison for captured Avengers – which turns out to be a chunk of Limbo full of demons. Rogue is appropriately shocked and, judging from the cover of next issue, will presumably be going in to rescue Ms Marvel after all.
Leave aside the casual dismissal of the central storyline of the last year and you’ve still got two major difficulties here. Number one, Ms Marvel’s explanation for approaching Rogue is “I know you better than any of the other X-Men.” What? Since when? The characters are linked by one major story, but they barely know one another. “I came after you because I thought I’d get under your skin” – yes. But “we’re good friends”? Surely not.
Number two, this phase of Avengers vs X-Men makes all the X-Men look like dimwits. It’s a necessary evil for the sake of the bigger story but it still causes problems for stories like this that have to build an entire issue around it. Anyone with the faintest understanding of how stories work knows that it’s clearly all going to go wrong – the final act has to come from somewhere – but for plot purposes the X-Men have to completely ignore that possibility and wholeheartedly commit to a programme of global reconstruction driven by five people possessed by a cosmic entity that the X-books have for years regarded as a by-word for “ominous”. Granted that Rachel provides some in-story justification for believing that the Phoenix can be controlled by its host, you’d still think a bit of caution would be in order, particularly when its hosts include the demon sorceress kept locked in the brig for everyone’s safety, and the guy who’s already the Juggernaut. But no.
So when Rogue learns that Magik is doing morally dodgy things and is surprised – well, she looks like the biggest moron imaginable. Sure, sometimes it’s necessary for characters to do stupid things to advance the plot. It can work with a bit of sleight of hand, or where the story gives the characters a reason to be wrong. Neither of those apply here. So when Rogue fails to spot something that even the dimmest reader will have figured out halfway through the first scene, you’ve got a big problem, and one that kills the story.
Yeah, Marvel are trying to have it every way at once.
It shouldn’t be this hard to edit a crossover, and it shouldn’t be so hard for writers to address glaringly obvious points within the event book or within one of the many books that are crossing over.
It really is a pity that they didn’t try harder because this event had the potential to be great. All the building blocks were there, and there have been some nice moments, but the moment you hold the story up to scrutiny, the whole thing falls apart.
I thought that Ms Marvel was saying that she knew Rogue more than she knew any of the other X-Men, rather than she knew Rogue better than the X-Men know Rogue; the phrasing is rather ambiguous. It still doesn’t quite work–offhand, if Ms Marvel was looking for someone likely to sway from the X-Men ranks, you’d think someone who she *didn’t* have a rather antagonist history with would be a better bet, like Storm, say. But I don’t think she was claiming that she was close friends with Rogue, shared memories or not.
As for X-Cast behaving like idiots–well, the Avengers had a long shift of that in the first part of the crossover, so to be fair, it’s the X-Men’s turn.
This is starting to feel more and more like Onslaught, where every writer forgot to put in the main plot points and you had to do a lot of the work yourself. Unlike Onslaught, with AvX you can at least sort of decipher what they’re going for. On the whole, I’d say I’m enjoying it, but the story really needs to be tightened up.
“This ought to be a major plot development for the series, but it’s being entirely glossed over in a way that’s either poorly co-ordinated (everyone thinks somebody else is covering it) or just plain lazy. You can’t set up a central conflict like the schism and just throw it away this casually”
wow, its m-day all over again.
considering the reason that Colossus was the Juggernaut is that Cyttorak didn’t like sharing it seems reasonable to figure that maybe Piotr isn’t the Juggernaut anymore.
I’m not paying much attention to this but from what I have seen it doesn’t look like the Phoenix possessed X-men have been mind controlling anyone or the like in their takeover. It kind of makes me think of the Cold War. Sure you could do this massively destructive thing, if you really want to, BUT all hell will come down on you if you do.
and with Rachel I imagine the key difference is the Phoenix didn’t eat any planets on the way to merge with her
Ive just come to view the crossover in qrestling terms.
The xmen are the heels and are now getting their shine. The avengers (now marvels flagship) will make the babyface comeback in an issue or two, leading to a big schmozz in the end.
Also for the X-Cast looking like idiots…it sounds like they are pretty much being stuck in a role similar to the Illuminati/pro-Registration side of Civil War.
The authority side can’t be completely right, or there wouldn’t be good enough grounds for a conflict. So the authority side has to take things “too far”, particularly once comic book exaggeration comes into play. Thus you end up with stuff like a cabal of powerful characters trying to run the world in its best interest, and throwing even heroes into a Negative Zone/Limbo prison.
(And yes, the Avengers were acting like idiots at first. They were also in the authority role at first. They started the conflict with the X-Men with their desire to capture Hope per-emptively.)
Y’know, concerning the issue of The Beast’s shifting loyalties, Tom Brevoort explained it quite well on his formspring account: The Beast had problems with The Avengers’ agenda UNTIL Cyclops declared, “No More Avengers,” at which point The Beast re-sided(?) with Cap and co. Which makes perfect sense, IF IT WAS EXPLAINED IN THE COMIC(S) PROPER. After all, we really shouldn’t have to search an editor’s Q&A thread to make sense of a funny book. Especially at $3.99 a pop….
And yet, asking why these plot threads weren’t made legible between AvX #6 and the W&tXM and XML issues causes Brevoort to rage against the audience needing their hands held. They straight-up do not seem to see any problems in the way information is being parceled out in this crossover – which tells me that on some extremely basic level they just don’t know how a story like this should be – needs to be – told.
He says “no more Avengers” at the end of AvX #6 without giving any indication as to what that entails, and then by the next week we’re already knee-deep in an anti-Avenger jihad that apparently needs no explanation. So much contempt for their readers.
They really are doing a great job of making no one look good in AvX aren’t they?
From a meta-story point of view, the X-Men look like idiots for not realizing the inteviablility of everything coming crashing down. Even within the context of the story, where the X-Men don’t realize that they’re in the middle of a plot that needs a conflict, they should realize that they are, in effect, conquering the world because they’re powerful enough to do it and setting all mutants above all humans, which is exactly what they’ve been fighting against their entire careers and exactly what they’ve spent their entire lives trying to convince humanity mutants WON’T do.
On the other hand, the Avengers look like bullies for attacking the X-Men when all they’ve done is try to help people. Rather than try to work with the X-Men or wait for signs of sinister intent, they decided to charge in and kidnap Hope because they honestly believe it’s impossible that the X-Men can actually pull off doing the right thing.
It’s like, the Avengers’ point of view seems like they know they’re in a story and that something HAS to go wrong, and the X-Men’s seems like they’re completely ignorant of their own history and haven’t considered the possibility that something COULD go wrong.
“Ms Marvel’s explanation for approaching Rogue is “I know you better than any of the other X-Men.””
That line doesn’t work at all, it would make so much more sense if Rogue was saying a variation of it to Ms Marvel (they have something of a shared history, but Carol never shared or absorbed any of Rogue’s memories).
Considering how many people are involved in this cross-over, you’d think there would be better and tighter editing and writing between the titles. You’d think that.
At this point, I just want it over so we can move to the next temporary status-quo Marvel will kick to the curb once their next cross-over starts.
I forget the status quo – does Carol Danvers even have any of Rogue’s memories? I know Rogue had Carol’s memories, and Carol got her own back at some point too, but why exactly would Carol know Rogue well?
or, what wwk5d just said.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I was very much looking forward to this story. If you look at the Avengers and the X-men’s shared history over the last few years, you could see a big story coming. I was very eager to see this happen.
Now I can’t wait to read it because it sounds like an utter train wreck!
Meh, I’m not so sure that Schism has been thrown out the window, or that the story hasn’t reasonably accounted for those characters from WatX working with the Phoenix Five. And to be fair, cosmic possession (and the global clean up that followed) is kind of a game changer, even if those characters hadn’t already decided to oppose the Avengers.
As for Ms Marvel…. maybe she just assumed Rogue knew her so well…
I wonder if Christos Gage misunderstood Rogue and Carol Danvers’ backstory and thinks that Danvers’ mind was literally trapped in Rogue’s body for a while.
I could swear I remember reading a book back in the 80s or 90s – when Rogue’s status quo was that if she absorbed someone’s powers they immediately fell unconscious for however long she had their powers and woke up immediately when she lost their powers – where the X-Men turned up in someone else’s book and the writer wrote someone whom Rogue absorbed as if they remembered what she did while they were unconscious, obviously thinking that their consciousness went into her along with their powers, personality, memories, etc. (which is a reasonable assumption if you don’t know that that isn’t how her powers work, considering how often her absorbed personalities were depicted as contesting her for control of her body). Maybe Gage just doesn’t know how that isn’t what happened from Carol’s point of view.
Now, what are the odds that in Avengers or Secret Avengers Carol will be shown adopting her new Captain Marvel identity BEFORE returning to Earth? Or that Rogue will bust her out of Magik’s prison in the next Legacy and part ways with her, and her time as a prisoner of the X-Men will never even be mentioned in any other book?
The whole issue with Rachel really annoys me as a long term reader. She should be front and centre: she’s a former Phoenix host! But it’s a case of editorial decisions driving the plot, rather than character. And that’s why it feels such a disjointed mess, with none of the characters coming out of it well. And also the whole concept of what the Phoenix is/was/does seems to have been muddled utterly too. I don’t like the way previous stories can be so cavalierly disregarded.
Shouldn’t Bishop return at some stage too, as some kind of Cassandra figure for all of this? Lend it some dramatic weight? Make it seem like this had actual connections to previous stories?
Meh, I think I just get bored where characters get shunted around by events, rather than characters moving events. I think you could swap any of the Phoenix Five for any other characters at the moment, given the utter lack of motivations at play.
Since Gage is writing Legacy, in which Rogue has been the focal character for the last several years and continues to be under his pen, you’d think he’d have looked up how her powers work.
If Carol had said “you know me better than any of the other X-Men does” everything would have been all right.
Rachel ought to be a major player in this event, but as Paul said, it’s actually becoming a plot point that she feels being sidelined in this whole affair, so it’ at least being addressed (and I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets a role in the final un-phoenixing of the Phoenix Five).
As for Schism being over… well. The basis of the whole thing was the dispute over whether the children ought to be trained and used as fighters or should be kept out of the fight. Beast and Wolverine excepted, the others on the Gold side didn’t hold a personal grudge against Scott, but rather a different point of view. Scott, for his part, has always considered those at the JGS as being on leave, but not as having completely seceded. In the current situation, the kids at Utopia don’t have to be used as fighters either, due to anyone of the Five being a match for basically anything, so there’s no reason why the JGS shouldn’t re-affiliate to Utopia. Not to mention that Beast and Wolverine have gone way over the edge in the view of many JGS members.
What really irked me about LEGACY, is how cavalierly Rogue steals Carol’s powers. I don’t buy it. It really downplays Rogue’s character development. Given the years she’s struggled with the repercussions of wiping Carol, and the fact that there was some indication that Carol’s DNA itself lead to Rogue absorbing Carol “permanently,” I don’t buy for a second that she’s take Carol’s powers, especially without permission, so casually. Despite everything going on, this eviscerates Rogue’s character to me.
And I totally agree that Rachel should be more up front and center. I don’t think she’d ever voluntarily “hound” again. The mandate to keep her experience with the Phoenix relegated to side plots is asinine.
I reckon Rogue must have hung out with Ms Marvel at the Avengers mansion a lot while she was rooting Sentry. Why not?
How long did Carol hang out at the mansion before she became Binary? It wasn’t very long, was it? But she was in space as Binary for a while? I quite like the idea that Hepzibah’s three fans might be raging that actually she is the X-Man that Ms. Marvel knows best, and this would have been a great excuse for a Hepzibah solo story.
Oh, that’s right. The Rogue and Sentry thing. Can we retcon that fucking retcon, please? We can’t blame Sentry on HoM, I assume? (That’s what I do with Romulus)
@Mika – C’mon, Hepzibah hasn’t been seen in … what’s that? She was just in Tabula Rasa with Namor? They finally remembered she exists right before introducing the first plot point in the history of comics for which Hepzibah would be the most logical character to use? Good catch.
@Si – Obviously Rogue was totally doing threesomes with the Sentry and Carol all the time, but the same is true of every female X-Man and Avenger (plus Sue Storm, Songbird and Northstar) so that’s not really a distinction. I mean, this is the Sentry we’re talking about.
Matt: you could just never mention it again. Or say some personality Rogue absorbed ages ago resurfaced and took over due to the emotions involved, and it was the girl whos personality she absorbed, not Rogue, who did the naughty. Or you could have her go, “wait, you thought I was talking about SEX? ew, no, we had some deep and meaningful chat room conversations” (though I can’t remember how the scene went so that last one might not work).
ZZZ: Do that and Jeph Loeb will be obliged to write about Red Hulk having a party with nine, no eighteen superheroines, and Wonder Woman as well. And then the president knocked on the door and awarded him the medal for awesome sex.
That is, Girl X did the naughty, later Rogue absorbed her memories, then years later during the funeral, the emotions involved caused Girl X’s personality to bubble to the surface of Rogue’s mind and briefly take over. But you don’t have to go into so much detail, just say “sometimes ah get confused to what’s mah memories and what ah absorbed y’all sugah whee doggy.”
Of all the people they could have picked to retcon that the Sentry was porking…
Are we going to wait for the podcast thread to discuss that Avengers art with the alleged new line-up?
That image isn’t the new line-up, it’s a reflection of the changes to the entire line.
I didn’t know what image you all were talking about, but I found it at CBR, and is that guy with the red X on his head Cyclops because that costume is UGLY.
Check out http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/07/03/marvel-now-jean-grey-exclusive/
Which, possible spoilers. And yes, that is one fugly costume.
I’d like to say it sounds exciting, but I’ve been burned too many times before. And besides, it’ll last a year and another fucking crossover will “promise big fuck off changes so we can do shit that’ll blow your fucking mind!!!!” and they’ll dump this status quo, too.
Here’s an idea, shake the hell out of the teams. New line ups for everyone. Mix and match. But have the heroes be on ONE TEAM. It’s not special when Wolverine is on 2 avengers teams and 4 x-men teams and 7 solos titles simultaneously.
Get it fucking right this time, in other words.
“it’ll last a year and another fucking crossover will “promise big fuck off changes so we can do shit that’ll blow your fucking mind!!!!” and they’ll dump this status quo, too.”
Welcome to: the last 28 years of mainstream corporate-published comics. You must be new here.
I always felt, before the mid-2000s, these company-wide status quo changes were few and far between, not every single year.
There was a good, 3 or 4 years during the Jemas/Quesada reign where there were no summer crossovers. It was how Morrison could have a completely uninterrupted run.
Could you imagine how great Wolverine and the X-men would be if Jason Aaron had the same luxury?
The Avengers vs. X-Men crossover is a prime example of everything wrong with Marvel these days: simply put, their editorial teams suck.
They just don’t talk to one another anymore, leading to terrible plot inconsistencies and characters acting well, out of character. I miss the Marvel editorial teams of the later ’70s and the ’80s, when stories from one book would cross neatly into another book, and editors made sure that plotlines and characterization would be consistent across the board.
The casualty in AvX is the Phoenix Force itself, once a celestial avatar of creation and rebirth fueled by passion, it’s now been reduced to a MacGuffin and a force of blind destruction. So sad.
@Michael Aronson
I entered the world of comics with Jim Lee and Howard Mackie. Reading both X-men and Ghost Rider (so, ’91 or ’92). As you can imagine, in that time I’ve read heaps of back issues, so no, definately not new here.
Cross-overs can be big events but not totally change the status quo (X-cutioners song, AoA), or can be an important event but ultimately part of the longer running story (Inferno, Mutant Massacre).
These current crossovers – mostly Avengers ones, I’ll admit – don’t feel part of a wider story arc, but we get 12 issues (or 2 stories) of Avengers on the run, then a crossover, then 12 issues (or 2 stories) of Avengers fighting fake Avengers, then a crossover, then 12 issues (or 2 stories) of Avengers being old school style heroes, then a crossover….
Each one is billed as “AND NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME!!!” and all that crap. Basically what I’m saying is that the formula is being followed too rigidly.
X-Cutioners song culminated some long standing plot threads and was important to the lead characters of that story, but after it was done the X-men weren’t “FUCKING CHANGED FOREVER!!!”. They continued to live in the mansion and do X-men stuff. X-Force had to learn to get by without their leader, but they were still X-Force.
At the end of Inferno the X-men went back home and did more X-men stories. You can still do a X-over every year without having to change EVERYTHING!
@wwk5d
On Sentry/Rogue, Rogue was picked because it shows how awesome Sentry was. Rogue could safely touch him, unlike anyone else in the world.
Except, you know, all the other people that Rogue’s been safely touching through one means or another since forever. Whether it be through power loss, immunity, or whatever other reason. The character has not exactly had the most frigid life, and certainly not to the point that she sleeps with the “only” available man on the planet because he happens to be available.
Wow. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to have a bigger fanboy boner over more, the Sentry or Red Hulk As Written By Jeph Loeb.