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Mar 3

The X-Axis – 3 March 2013

Posted on Sunday, March 3, 2013 by Paul in x-axis

It’s a podcast weekend, so check out the show one post down, where we’re reviewing Justice League of AmericaNova and Five Weapons.

Meanwhile, it’s another of those weeks where I haven’t yet received the books that I’m still buying in physical form, so we’ll be back later in the week to cover Astonishing X-Men #59, Gambit #9, and X-Treme X-Men #11.  As it happens, that still leaves us with plenty to talk about.  If I have time, I’ll also try to have a look over the first six issues of X-Men: Legacy, which are going to form the first trade paperback.  No promises, mind.

Uncanny Avengers #4 – This is the end of the first arc, but I see that the collected edition will actually run up to issue #5 – which, to judge from the solicitations, will contain a one-shot story rounding out both the cast and the page count.

This book clearly plans to use the Red Skull as a long-term villain, and that has the inevitable consequence that he can’t be too comprehensively defeated at the end of this story.  So the climax of this arc has to be that the Avengers prevail over his telepathically-supercharged propaganda efforts, and get the upper hand only for him to escape with his henchmen.  That’s going to be fine in the broader scheme of things, but it does feel a little anticlimactic as the pay-off for such an extended battle.

Still, there are good ideas in here; I like the way the Red Skull’s influence, which for plot purposes is basically mind controlled, is portrayed as propaganda.  It works better for the theme that Remender’s trying to develop – that the team exists to help counter anti-mutant prejudice – but it’s also simply more interesting in its own right. And it helps the Red Skull too; the danger with a character who’s outright evil is that they degenerate into cartoon figures that aren’t particularly threatening, and Nazi villains have the further difficulty of being explicitly linked to an ideology that’s been defunct for generations, but this way Remender’s able to connect him to more modern currents of thought.

There’s also a nice use of a flash-forward epilogue to build interest in future storylines.  It’s a device that DC have used a lot in their opening issues, but in this book it does seem more appropriate for it to fall here.  Incidentally, while this probably doesn’t come across as clearly in the no-doubt-advert-riddled print version, the digital version sticks the epilogue after the letters page, for a “but wait, there’s more!” effect.  And while it’s not the best art that John Cassaday’s ever done, it’s still pretty good on the whole.

But the book isn’t a home run.  The resolution of the immediate threat doesn’t quite satisfy; it feels a bit rushed, as if the Skull has to suffer a reverse now because it’s the end of the first arc.  And there’s something a little odd and old-fashioned in the tone of the narration; I’m not sure how I think about that, since in some ways it’s nice to see a writer going back to those devices on a team book like this, but it’s certainly not subtle.  Of course, it’s not meant to be, because this isn’t intended to be a subtle book, period – but it does feel a bit strange to modern eyes.

Uncanny X-Force #2 – This is better than issue #1; there are bits where a quirkier voice is starting to come through, like a rather nice gag of Psylocke mind-controlling a random guy to help her out in a fight, and making him see the world as a video game with the screen covered in slogans saying “YOU ARE SO BIG AND STRONG” and “FIGHT FOR BETSY!!!!”  Or Fantomex trying to romance his female clone with a gift consisting of stolen toothbrushes of the rich and famous.

On the other hand, we’re still not at a point where the book has established a premise that distinguishes it from all those other X-Men titles (unless you count “the one with this particular set of characters” as a premise).   And it seems we’re sticking with the idea that Bishop’s a raving loon – though admittedly that’s what Sam Humphries inherited, so I guess he’s got to start from there.  Perhaps this is going to end up being a rehabilitation arc, and maybe it’s significant that the cliffhanger has him with a giant fiery bear behind him – is this going to be some sort of callback to the old Demon Bear arc in New Mutants from the 1980s?  On the other hand, the plot casts him right back in the “nutjob hunter” role from Cable, which isn’t something I’m desperately keen to repeat.

Visually, the book has some great use of colours, and Garney does a very good crazy Bishop – the actual style of the art seems to distort slightly for him, which is a nice way of selling the point.  There’s some nicely dynamic stuff in the action scenes too, though there’s maybe a bit too much “people fighting” with nothing much turning on the details.  And there are storytelling problems when Spiral teleports to the roof with the little girl in tow; the girl’s presence is significant to the plot, but she’s not shown in the panel where Spiral departs, she’s seen only in long shot in the panel where she appears, and she’s then forgotten about for another two pages.

Still, a step up, and a pretty solid issue on the whole.

Uncanny X-Men #2 – Boy, it’s Single Adjective Overuse Week at Marvel, isn’t it?  Maybe we should have a whipround, buy them a thesaurus.

Anyway, this is an entire issue of conversation, though the Avengers do show up at the end to set up a fight for the next issue.  Scott and Emma talk about their relationship – that takes eight pages.  Then they give a fairly general introductory chat to the new mutants that they’ve recruited.  That takes another nine pages.  Then they decide they ought to go and visit Tempus’ parents, so there’s another two pages of talking there before the Avengers show up.  And that’s pretty much it.

It’s not that the character ideas here are bad; actually, I think Bendis has a reasonably good approach where Scott and Emma are concerned.  She’s been knocked off her perch and her life has been pretty much ruined thanks to Scott’s machinations, but then she did agree with him at the time, and she’s kind of stuck with him anyway, so…  That’s a perfectly fine starting point.  There are also some interesting hints at how Magik feels about all this, as she patiently tries to remind Scott that, hey, maybe a lot of these mutants will be looking for a quiet life and not all that interested in a revolution.  (Though this brings us back to the core problem of the series so far – it throws around the “revolution” word rather casually, but hasn’t really established what it really means, or even what the characters think it might mean.  I hope this isn’t heading towards “Scott doesn’t really know”, because that’ll just make him look a fool.  If all he’s planning to do is train these kids, why hasn’t he just dropped them off at the Jean Grey School and wished them well?)

Anyway: my problem with this issue isn’t so much what’s there, as what isn’t.  Bendis has perfectly viable ideas for these characters, but he isn’t dramatising them.  We get characters simply explaining themselves to one another, when a better story would have worked that information into an actual plot.  The pacing here is still just about acceptable given the book’s release schedule, but I’d surely rather see Bendis work these ideas into a proper story, instead of just having his characters expound on them at length.

X-Men: Legacy #6 – The concluding part of the first volume, which isn’t quite a single story arc; it’s a bit too episodic for that.  However, this issue does complete Legion’s battle with Blindfold’s older brother Luca and smooth over his relations with the X-Men, up to a point.  Conveniently enough, this being the climax and all, Legion gets enough control over himself to actually use many of his powers for a change, though Si Spurrier isn’t a writer to simply sets his characters to Fight for pages at a time.  Instead, the battle with Luca turns more on Luca’s hilariously Heath Robinson attempts to use his powers of prediction to outwit Legion with absurdly convoluted chains of events that he planned hours in advance.  The idea is that while this would normally work for Luca, it doesn’t with Legion, because his craziness makes him a little bit too unpredictable for that.

The pay-off to this fight doesn’t really turn on Luca, so much as a set-up for the next arc (which is the closing cliffhanger, so I won’t spoil it).  One point worth making, though, is that the sequences within Legion’s mind are starting to feel a little bit obligatory, as if Spurrier, having established this whole “prison” metaphor, feels obliged to keep coming back to it so that Legion can use his powers, but doesn’t actually have a great deal he wants to do with it.  Even the art seems a little bit casual on these sequences; these are the points where the series actually does degenerate into random fighting.

But if there are parts of it that feel a little unfocussed, it’s still a pleasingly offbeat series that brings something welcome and unique to the line.

Bring on the comments

  1. Alex says:

    I wish emma and illyana werent dressed/look so similar. Yes, one has a final fantasy sword, but in a team with so few characters, do you need 2 partly clad in black leather blondes, esp with an artst with a stylized style like bachalo?

  2. Somebody says:

    The Legacy cliffhanger didn’t work for me because it is so obviously not what it claims to be at face value. It could work, if it was genuinely played straight, but the supervillainous tone of the character’s speech (not just there, but earlier in the issue), seems to mark it out as… how to put this without spoiling too blatantly… another “Moira” (from Age of X) straight away.

  3. Matt C. says:

    [b]Uncanny Avengers #4:[/b] Probably my favorite of the issues I picked up this week. I’m still not a fan of Cassaday’s art, but it was fine here. The ending was certainly a little WTF-worthy, but definitely up Remender’s alley. One weird thing – it seemed like Wanda was purposely mimicing Thor’s speech patterns while fighting him. Not sure why.

    (Oh, and the print version does have the epilogue after the letters page, with no adverts after the page with Wanda and Rogue talking in the hospital).

    [b]Uncanny X-Force #2:[/b] I actually liked issue #1 better, because I thought it had better character moments (the Storm/Psylocke talk, Puck’s introduction, etc.) Seems like not a lot happens this issue – just more fighting, Spiral seeming misunderstood, then the cliffhanger. I was a bit worried with the treatment of Bishop here, but he seems to have moved past “bad guy claiming he has a (really vague) good reason” into “completely crazy”. If it leads towards salvaging his character, I’m all for it. But overall, two issues in without establishing the direction of this book isn’t a good thing.

    [b]Uncanny X-Men #2:[/b] Okay, I’m definitely starting to see that Bendis tends to have a lot of talking without much happening. Seems like we’re still in the same place as last issue – we’ve got Cyclops recruiting kids, living in their new hideout, and Magneto subverting that. The Cyclops/Emma conversation was good, but nothing else much happens. Also, AvX again already? Heh. I think Paul hit on the main flaw – we still don’t know what Cyclops’ plan or “revolution” is supposed to be, and that really blunts the impact of the book.

  4. Shadowkurt says:

    Uncanny X-Men: I like Bendis’ approach to Scott and Emma. She’s very different from how she was before, but I see it the same way Paul explained it. As for Scott, I hope his “revolution” plan gets a bit more clear. And I’m glad that Bendis is going to spend some issues focusing on Magik.
    I don’t buy that Magneto is betraying Scott, however. After all, without Magneto, Scott would still be in prison and possibly dead already, so I suppose that he’s lying to SHIELD and playing some game of his own. And I’m warming towards the children who have joined what calls themselves the X-Men but who are starting to find out that their mentors are basically the new Brotherhood, not to mention slightly off their rails, generally speaking.

    Uncanny X-Force: well, Bishop used to be a fanatic with a clear purpose (killing Hope) which he would follow no matter the cost. Now, he’s somewhat between raving mad and possessed, so it’s clear something happened since we last saw him (and did you notice that he got his arm back?). Besides, it looks like the writer is going to use Spiral as a foil to Psylocke – Rita having done to Betsy what Mojo did to her – thus possibly setting up a redemption arc for her, which should be interesting. She obviously cares for the girl in her charge, which would fit the original Rita.

  5. The original Matt says:

    The main issue I have with Bendis characters having extended dialogue is that it feels like they’re talking AT each other rather than TO each other. And it seems to only be plot or dialogue. Not a balance of both. And now, I haven’t read uncanny x-men, but all his avengers conversations always happened at a table.

    On the other hand… Uncanny avengers. Love this series so far.

  6. Jason says:

    I imagine that Scott wouldn’t drop them off in Westchester because Logan’s current POV/curriculum basically says everytime the first X-men team, or the New Mutants or Generation X or any of the modern groups went into a fight it was wrong. And Scott doesn’t believe that.

  7. Chaos McKenzie says:

    I’m happy to see no one attaching Bendis’ dialogue styles, though. I think it’s become a trend on the ‘net for everyone to accuse Bendis of making his characters sound the same and out of voice.

    Though I agree the plot feels slow, I really want to applaud Bendis’ dialogue on this issue. After reading every issue of everything he’s ever written, I truly feel the voices he uses for X-men are almost perfect and the dialogue in general to be at Ultimate Spider-Man or his Indie book levels.

    Anyone who has followed his Avengers since the beginning, has to admit the vast difference in quality behind the individual voices. This is worlds apart from the type of dialogue that is the butt of so many jokes online.

    I really felt like you could hear all of the vocal ticks as they happened. You could hear Emma struggling to hold on to her snobbish older self, being over taken with the blunt language of someone frustrated. And I honestly felt Magik has never sounded better, not just a character written to sound wicked – but like she sounded like an actual character.

    I was really impressed. And really wanted to draw attention to it. And if I’m drunk later, I will argue with anyone who wants to challenge me on it.

  8. Shadowkurt says:

    Chaos: I don’t want to challenge you at all. In fact, Bendis’ X-Men is outperforming my expectations at every level so far.

    My only difference is that I feel Magik “sounded better” when Zeb Wells was writing her – “better” in the way of a highly conflicted character who thinks she’s basically a demon and doesn’t know whether she should glory in it or hate herself for it. Bendis’ Illyana sounds too much at ease with herself. But given that it’s part of the plot that she’s the only one of the P5 who seems to have been strengthened by the experience, I suppose he knows what he’s doing.

  9. Max says:

    You sold me with Giant Fiery Demon Bear.

  10. Chaos McKenzie says:

    Shadowkurt – Good point.

    I saw her being at ease after beating the Elder Gods in Wells run, and ridding her brother of his snowflake bias on the Extinction Team.

    I’m still waiting for Magik’s canonical friendships to be remembered, there’s been hardly nothing with Kitty, absolutely nothing with Rachel, very little with the New Mutants (Wells’ long game story was excellent!), and does anyone remember how she was always Lockheed’s favorite outside of Kitty?

  11. “Nazi villains have the further difficulty of being explicitly linked to an ideology that’s been defunct for generations” – eh, you have heard about the Golden Dawn, haven’t you?

  12. moose n squirrel says:

    Golden Dawn are precisely why characters like the Red Skull squick me out. Over the last decade or so, it’s become commonplace to use “Nazi” as shorthand for “camp” in comic books. But the actual Nazis were a real historical phenomenon and not some collection of cartoon Saturday morning bad guys – and neither are modern-day fascists.

  13. moose n squirrel says:

    “We get characters simply explaining themselves to one another, when a better story would have worked that information into an actual plot.”

    That’s our Bendis!

  14. Ethan says:

    Mass Effect adaptations have the additional problem that at this point to set a story after ‘Mass Effect 3’ they would have to pick a canonical plotline. There’s really no way around this, you could easily enough chose not to use any of the main characters from the games (since virtually all of them can die before the last scene) but depending on what happens in Mass Effect 3, four whole sentient species with a lot of significance may or may not be extinct, and you can’t really write around that. If ‘Mass Effect 4’ (which won’t be called that) is set after ME3, then I think they’ll have to do that anyways if they want to have interesting characters at all.

  15. Ethan says:

    oops, should have posted that in the House to Astonish comments.

  16. Dave says:

    “I think it’s become a trend on the ‘net for everyone to accuse Bendis of making his characters sound the same and out of voice.”

    Because he does. And there’s the phrases like “That’s a thing now?” / “Is that a thing now?”, “I don’t know who that is”, “- I’m telling you -” that come up over, and over, and over and over again. Again? Again. Doesn’t matter who’s talking.
    Right?
    I know.
    etc, etc.

    Awful.

  17. Chaos McKenzie says:

    It did, and yes in Avengers it happened a lot… but he hasn’t been using that type of styling at all in his X-Men work, particularly in Uncanny X-Men 2 – he really showed a definite growth away from that and towards more distinct voices.

    And to be fair… a large number of people talk with that type of dribble, it’s just he was using it too much, but it’s evident that the dialogue in Uncanny and All New is significantly different and deserves to be judged so, on it’s own.

  18. ZZZ says:

    An X-Book is no place for a writer who uses the same phrases and themes over and over!

    (I kid, I kid.)

    A minor pet peeve of mine (minor because it can often be semi-legitimately handwaved as “that’s just how his/her powers work,” but it still feels like a cheat) is that, as entertaining as it can be, it seems to me that the ability to see the future should not necessarily translate into the ability to create an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque series of events set off by a seemingly random action and leading to a precise desired result.

    It’s really hard to explain exactly why it doesn’t seem to hold together for me but, to use the events of Legacy (so SPOILERS) it seems to me that:

    (1) Knowing that knocking on the wall will cause a candy bar to shoot out of a vent should not necessarily impart the knowledge of WHY that happened (i.e., Toad being startled and spilling his drink – for that matter, why was Toad relaxing while the rest of the faculty fought aliens on the front lawn?) or who and what all the involved parties are (i.e., even if we assume he also has the clairvoyance to see all the events taking place out of his line of sight, how does he know it was Doop’s candy bar – or who Doop is – or the name of the alien race whose technology is used in the air conditioner?).

    (2) This is the really hard one to explain, but it seems like there’s a big difference between the ability to foresee the end result of any random action and the ability to reverse engineer the random action that will produce an end result. Like, did he actually walk around the mansion thinking “Legion will chase me throug here in an hour, so … what if I stomp on the floor right here in an hour? (sees the future) OK, nothing. What if I do it a few feet to the left? (sees the future) Nothing. What if… (runs through every possible place he could stomp on the floor) Okay, stomping on the floor is no good. Let’s try knocking on the wall in this spot … nothing. Let’s try here … nothing. Let’s try over here … oh, if I knock on the wall right here in an hour, a Bamf will end up sailing through the air to catch a candy bar. Store that one away for later use. Okay, on to throwing random things at the wall…”

    I guess the simplest way of saying that is: how does the ability to see the outcome of actions you’re going to take let you know the result of an action you aren’t going to take but would if you knew they’d have good outcomes? It’s fine in situations when he shot the icicles to make them fall on his enemies, because knowing there are icicles overhead and knowing where your enemies will be when make a course of action pretty obvious, so from there it’s just a matter of timing. But he shouldn’t have even known there was a way to make a candy bar shoot out of the air vent unless he just ran down the results of every possible action he could perform in the room at any given moment in the future.

    Like I said, it’s a minor peeve, because the handwave will alway be “Oh, well, in addition to being precognitive, he’s also clairvoyant and he as the ability to intuitively understand, like, systems and stuff” but it still bugs me.

  19. Si says:

    ZZZ: Look at it like this. Marvel Universe has multiple timelines. So a precog must be able to see more than one. Probably all of the most likely ones, maybe the top ten. So a precog would be able to see a future where putting object A next to object B causes incident C, and deliberately manipulate events to achieve that outcome. It would have to be something that was likely to happen anyway of course. You wouldn’t need to know the precise placement of object A either, because it’s a likely future and therefore you’d be almost unable to put it in the wrong place even if you wanted to. Because in the future you’ve already put it in the right place.

  20. Omar Karindu says:

    Regarding Uncanny Avengers, I’ll give Remender a lot of credit for having his 1940s-era Skull actually emplkoy real-world fascist tactics rather than playing “camp Nazi in leathers” stuff.

    The Nazis took on elements of left-wing rhetoric about workers and socialism, so Remender’s Skull similarly borrows the methods and rhetoric of his political opponents, for instance, so we get a Skull who uses powers and even dialogue — “To me, my S-Men!” — straight from the Charles Xavier playbook.

    The Avalanche framejob is the Reichstag Fire, especially the more conspiracist version that posits the Nazis set up the fire itself rather than springing on it opportunistically. John Doe plays to the specific use of propaganda as a modern technique that so characterized the work of Goebbels.

    And his speech-with-images directed at Captain America in issue #4 has quite a bit of “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche” to it (Sharon Carter, the happily Aryan homemaker!) along with some healthy dollops of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can Happen Here, though naturally relayed with a quite different tone. this is anything but the usual cheap, exploitative “Nazism as camp classic villainy” shtick that deserves vocal criticism when it turns up.

  21. --D. says:

    @ZZZ — Peter David qua Layla Miller always seems to suggest that it’s a reflection of a lack of free will. It’s not that the precog can predict how things might come out if a certain action were taken. Rather, its the fact that a certain action is predestined to occur, and that’s how the precog knows the following sequence of events.

    Of course, Layla’s not a precog anymore, right?

  22. Andy Walsh says:

    Layla was never a precog. She knew the future because she had already lived it/visited it and brought knowledge of it back to her past self. The lack of free will stemmed not from any sense of predestination, but just because she had to make sure things turned out as she remembered them to guarantee that she stayed in that timeline and continued to know what was coming.

    Now that she has made a choice different from what she remembered, her knowledge of the future has become unreliable.

    I share ZZZ’s disbelief about predicting the future, particularly point #2. (Although I am willing to suspend that for a good enough story.)

  23. Omar Karindu says:

    Even before Layla’s future knowledge “ran out,” chaotic elements like Quicksilver could screw her up. The “history” she knew was never entirely set in stone.

  24. moose n squirrel says:

    @Omar – I’ll give Remender credit for making his Skull seem a bit more like an actual fascist than the usual approach, which is to basically write him as Dr. Doom’s dim-witted racist uncle. But the overall approach is still pretty steeped in kitsch, from the over-the-top image of the Skull brandishing Professor X’s brain at the end of issue #1 to the appearance and codenames of the S-Men (and even the hilariously eyerolling “to me, my S-Men!” line). Certainly Remender is not trying to say anything about the roots of or appeal of fascism – in this arc, people become swayed by Naziism because of pernicious mind-control powers, which isn’t much of analysis of the non-comic-book far right.

  25. Omar Karindu says:

    I suppose that the Red Skull is inevitably kitschy; the character design alone pretty much ensures it, and the camp factor comes in as soon as the inevitable scene where the dressed in the American flag starts punching him. Remender needed a big villain with Avengers ties who also has a reason to hate mutants, and the Red Skull unfortunately fits the bill.

    However, I’m more charitable than you are towards the Skull’s use of mind powers to inflame the prejudices of those around him. It’s not portrayed as straight-ahead mind-control; issue #3 has Havok point out that the Skull’s power works on what’s already there in people.

    To me, that’s the sort of superpowers-as-allegory bit that superhero comics almost have to use by default. It seems no different to me than the way Mystique’s shapeshifting works as an allegory for passing or the Sentinels represent the way prejudices take on a destructive life of their own. In both cases a complex social or cultural system is quickly demonstrated by turning it into a direct mechanical or physical system. The allegory is reductive, of course, but it’s probably a bit late to complain about the reality that the X-books are usually a reductive allegory for prejudice and identity politics.

    Showing the Skull patiently building up support in beer halls and attracting crowds of resentful people wouldn’t work, mostly because he’s an outright Nazi and notorious supervillain with a death’s-head mask. I suppose the Skull could have stayed behind the scenes and just sent out his “living propaganda” recruit, but that mostly defers the issue of when the recruits actually meet the head man.

    The character seems like the problem here, and so to me the way Remender uses the Skull seems clever given the inherent limits imposed by the design, genre, and continuity.

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